Club night Monday 11 March

Tutor’s Notes
It was a pleasure to teach you all on Monday. My first teaching date for the year and what a responsive bunch you are!
We started the night off with a dance Skip Change Only to recap some of what we have learned. As the name suggested, this dance only has Skip Change of Step in it.

After that we moved on to learning the most difficult step to master Pas de Basque. Below are some notes about this step and a video can be found at Pas de Basque
It was great to see you all keeping a nice even rhythm when trying this step.

Pas de Basque

    • This step is used for setting and sometimes travelling over small distances
    • The movement is spring beat, beat and….takes one bar of music
    • Starting to the right: you spring onto the right foot, bring the left foot into third position in front, transfer your weight to the left front foot then to the right back foot while lifting the front left foot into a Jete (front toe pointed down and slightly above the floor)
    • To “set” two bars of music are used. Setting is one pas de basque on the right foot and one on the left.

We danced Espie McNabb to try out our Pas de Basque in a dance.
Espie McNabb

We then had a look at leading down the middle for 3 steps and back. A bit trickier coming back with the left foot and danced the strathspey Sally’s Fancy with this movement in it.

To give the club members who have danced a bit more of a challenge we danced Mrs Stewart’s Jig.

We then looked at the 3 couple Allemande. This is similar to the 2 couple Allemande we have danced earlier but the first couple only has two steps to dance around the top so the ditti to remember this is:
“Out-and-pivot, pivot-face-down, down-the-dance, down-the-dance, into-line, in-and-under, retire and retire”
It is really important that the 1st man is pivoting and not moving up too far or the other couples following don’t have time to get around.
We danced Tap the Barrel to put our 3 couple Allemande into practice. See Allemande

Our final formation for the night was Back to Back again notes on this are below and a video can be found at: Back to back

Back to Back
This is danced in 4 bars of music with 4 steps. (We used skip change of step)
We danced back to back with your partner. This starts on the sidelines facing your partner.

  • The 1st step (right foot starting) is used to advance toward your partner and pass by the right shoulder.
  • On the 2nd step you move sideways to the right (passing back to back with your partner). Your left foot crossing over the right to achieve this.
  • On the 3rd and 4th step you us skip change of step backwards to retire to the sidelines

Our final dance for the night was Joie de Vivre (Joy of Life) a great dance that is popular on dance programs. This was a little trickier but used most of what we had learnt over the night and you managed fantastically. Here is video a Joie de Vivre