Fabulous fun!

What brilliant time was had at both classes this week. Monday and Tuesday sessions were really well attended - by both visitors and regulars - as usually happens close to the ball - but more importantly they were fabulous fun. Whether we dance well on Saturday 11th, or not, everyone seems to be enjoying the process of learning enormously. Everyone is telling me how they are checking out the videos of the dances and doing their best to learn them, it's certainly being reflected by the number of visitors to the website. Of course it's much better to learn a dance by dancing it, however, done properly, the videos can be really useful too - here are a few tips to using them...

• don't watch all the dancers; select just one e.g. 1st lady or 1st man, ' get into their head' and do the dance with her or him, even lift your right or left hands when she/he does to build your muscle memory. Once you are confident you can do it from that position, choose another position - maybe 2nd lady and dance it 'through her/his eyes' in the same way. You may find this difficult at first - it takes a significant degree of concentration and can actually be tiring, however it is an great way to exercise your brain and becomes easier the more you practice.
• listen to the music and practice counting the bars to know where you should be at any moment; dancing in a set is like singing in a choir - you sing in time with the music and that keeps you synchronised with the rest of the choir - similarly you have to match your dancing with the music, and that keeps you synchronised with the rest of the set. Keeping the choral analogy, if you miss a few words, and the rest of choir is now singing the chorus, it's not going to work if you join in with the bit of the verse you missed out! It's more difficult to catch up if you've gone wrong in a dance, but if you are aware of how the dance works with the music you can more easily rejoin with the rest of the set and get the whole thing going again.
• Don't watch too many dances at once; use the videos to pick out the dances you'd most like to do and make sure you are solid with those, from all the positions, before attempting others. 
• Use the cribs while watching; this may not be an obvious thing to do but most people find it difficult to remember more than the name of a dance for more than a few minutes - mainly it's because we don't have the vocabulary to remember the moves concisely. Use the cribs from your ball dance programme and refer to them while you are watching to build up your 'crib knowledge'. Try stopping the video after every 8 bars and read the crib instructions. This has three benefits; 1. if you aren't sure what the written instructions mean you can use the video to understand them 2. it gives you the chance to 'log' the moves in a shorter version e.g. '1/2 figure of 8', is easier to remember than 'I've got to dance to the right between the couple above me, then round the back of the man diagonally opposite and then stop on the opposite side from where I start that bit, and do it in 4 steps'! 3. we all know we learn better if information is presented to us in more than one way - reading instructions as well as watching the videos gives that extra 'push' to our memories

FYI - At a ball we don't usually walk through a dance before doing it, however the dances are always 'recapped' once the sets are made up, reminding yourself what the moves are called while you watch a dance on the videos helps you make the most of the recap on the night.
Finally, just a note to congratulate our junior visitors on Tuesday, brilliant dancers the pair of them, they really smashed 'Postie's Jig' I hope they enjoyed it enough to join us again sometime, and maybe find a class back home? - and also - well done to our volunteer bar staff both of whom joined in with a dance during the night - it shows that just watching can be enough if done often enough and with attention! See you all next week Jx