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~ Thursday, June 17, 2004 ~
...and *that* was Morris Dancing
I'm happy to report that the Wayward Youth 2004 tour was wildly successful. There are one or two pictures from it up on Wayward Andrew's site, if you want to see what we did. Rumour has it there will eventually be narrative comments too. Meanwhile, for the Morris dancers who read this, here are the dances we did.
Cotswold Dances
Ascot-Under-Wychwood: Trunkles, Mary's Dance, Buns in the Oven (The latter two are Ring O' Bells dances, which made sense, because including me, we had four members of Ring O' Bells with us.)
Badb'y: Donkey Riding, Shepherd's Hey, and Tossing (Tossing was like shooting, except we tossed instead. And I know what you're thinking, and no, we did *not* throw our sticks at the musicians on the last chorus.)
Bampton-in-the-Bush: Highland Mary (This was the mass dance we did when we were finishing a stand and dancing with whatever other team showed up to dance with us.)
Bledington(?): Monk's March (I played for this one too...I never did get all the different capers up to performance level while we were learning the dances at Lake George.)
Ducklington: Lollipop Man (We performed this at the Glenn Echo contradance near Washington, D.C. Snatch capers on a nice bouncy wooden floor...yum.)
Upton-upon-Severn: The Stick Dance (Not really a Cotswold dance originally, but it's been Cotswoldized since. I like how there are, apparently, two dances in the Upton tradition, and one's a hanky dance and the other's a stick dance. Upton serves as a lovely little model for morris dancing as a whole, in which, as everyone from the careful student to the casual observer knows, there are two dances, the hanky dance and the stick dance. It's kind of like Irish music, which has two tunes, the reel and the jig.)
Non-Cotswold Dances
Border: Four Lane End (I love this one)
Lichfield: Vandals (for 4, because we didn't officially learn it, and there weren't eight who already knew the dance)
Rapper: Velocirapper's dances #3 and #4 (we had four former members of Velocirapper with us, and one girl who used to dance rapper with another team and a second girl who learned it in two days). I played accordion for these so I can't really describe them in much detail, but they were really cool to watch, and sometimes so interesting that I had to not watch so I wouldn't mess up, even while playing Swallowtail, a very simple jig.
Current Music: Plain Capers, John Kirkpatrick
~ prattled by Miriam at 4:36 p.m. [+]
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