Special thanks to everyone who came to our "Flourishes Are Fun!" workshop at FootFall on Saturday! We had a great turnout and I hope everyone had a good time and learned a few things along the way! (Feedback at the scene was generally positive. As with anything, there's stuff we'd like to do differently should we run the workshop again. but overall we're pretty proud of our effort.) Thanks to April Blum for inviting us to do it! We had a blast and hopefully folks will use the stuff we taught as starting points to think about new ways to inject some variety into a contra dance without accidentally lessening someone else's fun in the process (and if they find something cool, to send it our way!).
One of the interesting things that I discovered along the way is that the similarities between contra and English country dancing and ceilidh dancing and Scottish country dancing (which I also sampled -- lots of fun, but I can understand where some folks have said that over time their knees/ankles have not been thrilled about it) do lend themselves to a bit of syncretism there, too -- we've already shown you a gate in place of an allemande, and there are setting motions which easily can be done during a balance in contra that don't require your partner to mirror you exactly in order for you to continue and be where they expect you.
In our workshop, Steve and I showed a couple of littler flourishes (like using arming instead of an allemande -- not to be used on folks with arm/shoulder issues) and one dancer told me that for her regular allemandes could be painful (something about the angle of her arms) and that the elbow one worked (and she pulled it on me mid-dance to prove her point).
Thank you again to everyone who showed up and to those who answered my all-call last week for dances.
One of the interesting things that I discovered along the way is that the similarities between contra and English country dancing and ceilidh dancing and Scottish country dancing (which I also sampled -- lots of fun, but I can understand where some folks have said that over time their knees/ankles have not been thrilled about it) do lend themselves to a bit of syncretism there, too -- we've already shown you a gate in place of an allemande, and there are setting motions which easily can be done during a balance in contra that don't require your partner to mirror you exactly in order for you to continue and be where they expect you.
In our workshop, Steve and I showed a couple of littler flourishes (like using arming instead of an allemande -- not to be used on folks with arm/shoulder issues) and one dancer told me that for her regular allemandes could be painful (something about the angle of her arms) and that the elbow one worked (and she pulled it on me mid-dance to prove her point).
Thank you again to everyone who showed up and to those who answered my all-call last week for dances.
