Dancers' Dance - National Folk Festival 2010

Monday, 5 April 2010
Time: to be confirmed (probaby not as published!)
Venue: Oasis Dance Marquee

featuring the music of the wonderful Coalbrook Band (with Chris Duncan and Bob McInnes)

The Concept for the Dancers' Dance

The Dancers' Dance caters for experienced dancers from the Australian Colonial, English and Scottish Country, Irish Set and Ceili, American Contra and similar dance genres. The dance program will contain dances from these sources that are popular with experienced dancers. Most dances will be called, but not walked through. The Dancers' Dance will have the usual selection of dances from these dance traditions with a combination of easy and challenging dances. Some dances have been in existence for centuries, and some are only a few years old. The emphasis will always be on having fun, with beautiful music and interesting dances.

Dances are selected using various criteria. We deliberately chose this to be a Dancers' Dance rather than a Dancers' Favourites. Past feedback has been that given the vast repertoire of dances suitable for this occasion, some of dances that might be favourites in a popularity contest have become rather over-danced. If we tried to include even a moderate percentage of the most requested dances this session would have to be 4-6 hours long. (Perhaps if you think we should have something like that you should let me and the festival organiser know!)

Dances will generally have only a brief recap. Couples dancers will be led from the floor and you can join in as soon as you are comfortable with the version we have selected. Many of the dances could be considered relatively simple for experienced dancers, even if you dance that genre of dancing only occasionally. We won't spend much time seeking extra people to make up sets. You may need some dancers in your set to double up, or dance as a smaller set, but hopefully everyone will enter into the spirit of our event and help your set out with extra dancers.

The concept of no walk-thoughs may change as we had asked for 2 hours for the Dancers' Dance amd an hour for a Dancers' Dance Refresher Workshop, but appear to have been allocated 2.5 hours in one block. I'll consult the band and work out how they would most like to schedule their time...

General Information

The line up for the Coalbrook Band will be the entire Strutt family (Helen & Greg, Jennifer & Catherine) plus the combined fiddle expertise of Bob McInnes and Chris Duncan.

The festival has lost the Coorong as a dance venue, so there are only two dance venues for formal dances and workshops: The Mallee & the Oasis. I have been told that we have time for a separate practice workshop as well as the Dancers' Dance.

The program contains some simple and some challenging dances, but hopefully all will be interesting for experienced dancers. The dances cover a number of cultural styles. This year the organizers have asked us to have callers appropriate to each genre of dance. As a special treat we have George Marshall joining us to call a couple of contra dances along with the usual collection of local villains!

Dancers' Dance - Dance Instructions

A separate page with a program & instructions for the dances has been created (although there is virtually nothing on it yet!).

Dancers' Dance E-mail List - Announcements & Feedback

I hope this web page will be the main way of letting you know about the Dancers' Dance. I expect to nominate for the 2010 Dancers' Dance. If you wish to hear about Dancers' Dance developments please send me your e-mail address. At present I have a list of about 60 addresses, but I know many who attended the 2009 dance knew little about the Dancers' Dance until they turned up.

Note: I send out very few e-mail messages preferring to refer dancers to this page, and use only the Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) feature of my e-mail program so no uncoded e-mail addresses are distributed across the Internet.

I'd be interested to hear your feedback about this years' session, both negative as well as positive. If you enjoy the Dancers' Dance please also let Dave O'Neill know. In fact, let Dave O'Neill know about any dance (or other event) that you enjoyed at the festival, or about any other constructive criticism. We have seen positive moves from previous comments. Things may take a while to change, but the weight of comments does eventually have some effect.

Related (and independent) Dance Workshops

• Although I have not yet been informed by the organisers, it appears that the other workshops that had been agreed to by the National Folk Festival committee have not been scheduled on the draft program pages.

Newcastle Ad-hoc Day(s) of Dance

If you found the Dancers' Dance enjoyable and wish to do more dancing like this and are able to travel to Newcastle you might like to visit the companion page where I post information about our Ad-hoc Days of Dance. These are organized on an irregular basis Newcastle, but the usual format is a whole day of dancing from 10 or 10:30 am through to 4 or 5 pm with breaks for lunch and afternoon tea, and then generally a get-together at a local club (or similar) for dinner.

I also maintain an e-mail list for the Newcastle Ad-hoc Day of Dance, so if you are interested in being kept informed please send me your e-mail address. This is an invited session intended for those who have achieved a high level in various types of Anglo-English-Celtic dancing.

Contact details

For more information contact Arthur Kingsland
     
      T: (02) 4955 5701
      W: <http://users.tpg.com.au/juliasm/Dancers-Dance.html>