Category: Gig notes

Are you doing a French Mazurka?

I’m writing this on the train home from Towersey Festival to which I had been invited by my friends Nat and Sophie to help out with some swing teaching and performing for the Shooting Roots line-up. Towersey was my introduction to folk festivals, and it felt like a gateway to a fascinating world of music and dancing to discover. Nat and I were there to teach a 1 hour Lindy hop class and to do some dancing with a band in the evening (see the gig notes below for info).

Towersey felt quite unlike any festival I’d been to before, and I think the main difference is the way in which people are engaged with the music and dance that is being performed. The crowds are attentive; they really listened in our lesson; they were really paying attention in the band performances. People are having a great time but there is none of the rowdiness, (except for being kept awake by a choir singing in four part harmony at 1am in the campsite). I love the way people carry around instruments, and there is space for people to jam. There was also the largest selection of real ales I’ve seen at any festival. And what’s more people walk around with their own tankards, which as far as I’m concerned is the best way yet to reducing festival waste.

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September 8, 2015
Teaching le Charleston Stroll – the Port Sainte Marie Method

Teaching the Charleston Stroll has become the mainstay of the Mudflappers’ festival swing dance teaching. I think there’s three reasons why it is so popular with crowds: the footwork is easy to pick up, which means that people can quickly overcome their fear of not being able to dance; the fantastic feeling you get from being in a large group of people all moving in sync with each other and the music; and finally there’s the snowball effect whereby a group of people dancing together keeps drawing more and more people in.

This year, the Mudflappers performed in the village of Port Sainte Marie in the south-west of France as part of the country’s national Fete de la Musique. We had already performed four routines and the crowd wanted a lesson. Le Charleston Stroll was the obvious choice. But rather than teach the usual set of variations (fearing being incomprehensible after one-too-many peach juice-infused presssions) we came up with a cunning teaching method. We prominently stationed one Mudflapper on each of the four corners of the crowd, standing on, say, a bench. The crowd did the basic routine facing me and then turned to face the bank, where that Mudflapper would do a variation and everyone would copy. They would then turn to face the town hall where another dancer demoed another variation, and so on, until we faced the front again. Holding the microphone, all I had to do was shout, ‘vers la banque’, ‘vers la mairie’, ‘vers la route’ and ‘vers la Garonne’ – using my best beginner French.

And it worked. At 11:30pm in the heart of a sleepy French village in which in all my life I have never seen more than four people congregate, we had 50-odd people doing the Charleston Stroll. The Port Sainte Marie technique as it will henceforth be called is now standard issue in the Mudflappers manual – coming soon to a festival/soirée musicale near you.

July 20, 2015
8-count basic lindy hop lesson

Tuesday nights are when the Mudflappers teach our weekly beginners’ swing dancing class before the London Dance Orchestra takes to the stage at Swing at the Scolt Head. Since I have been doing a lot of the teaching recently I have deployed my usual set of beginners’ class material and so I am having to come up with some new content. Since quite a bit of thought goes into this, I thought I would make some record of it on this blog, not least so I don’t forget in future.

In recent classes we have been spending a lot more time on warm ups. This week we put on Opus One by the Mills Brothers and just got the crowd to shake different bits of their body to the music. It felt really good and everyone seemed instantly to have shaken off their day.

Next up, we taught a bit more of the Shim Sham. This week we tackled the trick bit, the break. (I think we could dedicate a whole class to learning breaks, and maybe call it ‘Breaking Good’). We started by clapping the rhythm, then worked through the footwork, calling the steps. Pretty quickly the crowd picked up, and we had them doing their breaks to the classic T’Ain’t what you do.

Then on to the bulk of the bulk of the lesson, which we spent teaching side-by-side lindy hop moves. I think this set of moves feels really good to learn because you can really move a long way on the dancefloor, you can style it up lots, and the benefit of a strong connection can really be felt. We taught side-by-side charleston, and taught kick ups, and kick the dog. We then showed how from a side-by-side Charleston you can do an inside turn to reverse direction, and from there to move into a hand-to-hand Charleston.

To fit all this in in an hour and half we had to keep the pace up. We did our usual half-time drinks break about two thirds of the way through and then we upped the pace to fit in the hand-to-hand Charleston. By the end, I think everyone in the crowd had nailed the routine and felt pretty good and warmed up for the band.

The last thing to mention is for this week, I paid particular attention to the music. Earlier in the week I had discovered the music of Kid Ory, and so the whole teaching playlist was tracks by him: Ain’t Misbehavin’, Joshua Fit the Battle of Jerricho, Muskrat Ramble and Maple Leaf Rag, all top tunes which I can’t get out of my head. I’m looking forward to next week!

January 15, 2015