August - With bells on

Another month, another festival, another dance.

Here I am in the surprisingly sunny hills of the Brecon Beacons. The bruised skies above keep threatening downpours & I’m living on meteorological tenterhooks.

Contrarily dressed in sunglasses and wellies (& thankfully something in between) I’m up with the crows watching dawn break over the impending view. Technically speaking I’m not actually up with the crows; I was in fact out with the owls all night & have a giddy tiredness now to prove it. But I intend to stay up a little bit longer purely to watch the Morris Dancing workshop that is about to take place in the children’s area. 

When I embarked on this resolute project at the beginning of the year Morris dancing was at the very top of my list. But way back in January it seemed an utter impossibility. You don’t get your fair share of dance classes with sticks and hankies in London. For once fate is on my side.

I’m a sucker for anything echoing a folkloric past. I’m a sucker for any activity that can be combined with a nice pint of ale. So I bound over to the approaching group of dancers to see if I can have a go at waving a hankie with them. I find their leader. He’s the one with the tallest top hat, adorned with the most feathers & skulls & jingly bells & bottle tops. He hears my crashdance plea & the whole group kindly oblige to give myself & a roped-in friend our own public one-to-one crash-class.

The leader takes off his hat, his homemade purple tasselled mumming cloak & hands them to me to put on. They feel like lead armour. Finally I am handed a wooden truncheon. It looks like it could do some uncoordinated damage. I pity my dance partner & wonder why they didn’t start me off with a less threatening foolproof hankie.

And so with the sound of an accordion and the rhythm of a booted rhythm stick the dance begins. There’s a clacking of truncheons and a jingling of bells & fortunately for me & my patient dance partner I don’t manage GBH once. We are taught the dance sequence in simple sections, Then before you know it if we’ve got the whole sequence under our belts and hats and cloaks & finish the routine with a war-like cry as we raise our sticks above our heads.

Just an average Sunday.

And now for that pint of ale.

(with thanks to the Chepstow dance troop)

 

 

 

 

July - Two by Two

It’s the heart of festival season and I’m at Camp Bestival, a family-friendly boutique festival staged in the grounds of Lulworth castle in Dorset. (Yes it’s a very nice place*)

I’m determined to fit in a dance before the month is through so I opt for a sedate Sunday morning Waltz, hosted in the Come Dancing tent by a tutor who appears to be a tap dancing Butlins red coat, crossed with your dad. Yes your dad.

Our surrogate dancing dad is accompanied by his DJ son, three dancing demo “princesses” & a back catalogue of jokes so bad that his repertoire makes an average box of Christmas crackers feel like the Edinburgh fringe.

Camp Bestival holds the tradition of fancy dress on the Sunday. The theme this year is Animal Magic. I have come as a welly-wearing leopard. My dance partner who I met two days before is a fancy dress cross between a welly wearing alpaca and a lamb. Dinosaurs, bees, monkeys & the remainder of Noah’s Ark fill the rest of the tent two by two, setting a surreal Sunday morning backdrop for our class ahead.

And just when I thought things couldn’t get more bizarre, in walks Frankie Boyle. I’m glad to see that even celebrities like Frankie have made the effort with this year’s Animal Magic theme. Frankie’s come in a Homo Sapien outfit with magical beard. I’m a bit of a fan. I have a soft spot for this foul-mouthed Scotsmen. I instantly regret my leopard face paint.

Frankie takes a pew in the corner of the tent. He adopts the contemplation, beard-stroking poise of a man bemused. He remains there for the full hour studying the group of waltzing, welly-clad animals. He even remains there when surrogate dad tries to spark up comedy rapport, throwing in a few Boyle jokes for measure 

It’s enough to put you off your steps. But maybe there was animal magic in the air, for by the end of the hour I was waltzing around the dance floor as gracefully as any welly footed leopard could be.

*All jokes courtesy of my surrogate dad, & not Frankie Boyle.

June - All that Jazz

Following the pain of Bollywood Grooves I have decided to dumb-down my approach to Crash-dancing this month & opt for an “Absolute Beginners” class in Jazz.

I have no idea what Jazz dancing involves. Presumably hands. But I take comfort in knowing I fit the “Absolute Beginner” category perfectly & what’s more, I have hands.

Someone once told me “forewarned is forearmed”. With hindsight they took their maxim too literally & shot things with arrows. Yet this mantra has remained with me since, so pre-class I have a little online snoop to check out the lo-down of my soon to be Jazz tutor.

She is the unfeasibly tanned, ginger-haired love child of Bonnie Langford & David Dickinson. And just as I’m reaching to adjust the colour tones on my monitor I read the worst combination of words that any “absolute beginner” could possibly read: “recently seen as boot camp expert with simon cowell on the x factor…”

Oh joy.

The packed class is the size & temperature of a Kew Gardens’ hot house. There’s no time for introductions. There’s no time for gentle stretching. There’s not even time to imagine that there’s a wire attaching my head to the ceiling…

Instead, we begin with the renowned boot camp aerobics warm up. The girl next to me promptly sinks down into the box splits.

Absolute Beginners my arse.

And here lies the problem with these classes, whereby the level for the mass is set by the ability of the strongest dancers present who have a life time of dance experience under their size zero belts. It leaves any true beginners like myself out-daunted & out-danced. Sure we all have to learn. I would just prefer to learn with other true beginners; or possibly toddlers at this rate.

Following the physical humiliation of a shattering aerobics warm up we are then made to dance like Pussycat Dolls to a tortuous track ironically called “Hush Hush”. Wishing the track would stop, I shuffle in the back completely in awe of how vain folk can be. They eye-up their feline selves in the wall length mirrors and appear to come onto their very own reflections.

Meanwhile, I do a very good (if not somewhat puritanical) jazz routine. Unfortunately it doesn’t represent anyone else’s routine. I get a little frustrated that the others aren’t keeping pace & storm off in a diva hissy fit, leaving the Jazz hot house without their Nicole Scherzinger.

May - I have the next dance?

It’s May. As much as I have tried to find a traditional maypole dance class, it appears that Londoners just aren’t into that kind of pole dancing anymore. Instead I have reverted back to my “pin the tail on the donkey” method of dance-class selection. Fate deals me the blow of Bollywood Grooves.

My heart sinks. Other than having recently watched Slumdog Millionaire & being partial to a lamb pathia on a Saturday night, I will be blissfully unqualified for what lies ahead.

“I’m off for a Bollywood!” I shout as I leave the office.  It’s a bit too much information for my work colleagues. On hindsight they think I have discovered a new style of bikini wax. I vow to never shout this out in public again.

The class is a mixed bunch of graceful Freida Pinto wannabes. (I wannabe out of here)

Our teacher begins with the bog-standard warm up routine: “Imagine there is a wire attached to the top of your head, stretching you towards the ceiling…”

I now know this routine like the back of my hand and the top of my head. From here we are lulled into some gentle yogic manoeuvres & with it a false sense of security of what is of course to follow. It’s been a long time since I’ve saluted the sun but the outcome is mildly warm and balmy & relaxing. And just when I am ready for a good pair of slouch socks and a more horizontal position, the music is pumped up and Bollywood Grooves begins.

We are taught a narrative dance routine in which the movements mirror the lyrics to the music track being looped in the background. The intention is to display a story of love & courtship as it musically unfolds.  I clearly have an inability to remember a simple dance sequence, and my own routine doesn’t follow a strict linear narrative. In fact I dance in the style of James Joyce.

Our teacher smiles crazily, whilst wobbling her head from side to side like an eager nodding dog.  She even smiles crazily at my stream of consciousness moves. (Who am I kidding it is probably a chuckle.)

I have never trusted folk who smile too much, especially those who manage to smile through pain. In fact this dance class is earning its own special ranking in my personal poll of pain, nestled somewhere between a Brazilian & a Hollywood wax. I’ll hybrid that as the “Bollywood” & smile my way through it.