[SCA-Dance] Reasonable Success with KWDMS Dances

[tmcd at panix.com]

We just had the first dance practice since I got back from KWDMS.
I taught 3 dances.

* Ballo del Fiore.  To quote Che from _Evita_, "She didn't go down
like we thoughta she would."  And I even brought real carnations for
people to use.  It took a long time to teach, perhaps because of the
unfamiliarity of the steps.  We don't do Rostiboli; the only Italian
ren we do is Petit Vriens, Amoroso, and sometimes Gelosia.  Also,
people seem confused and frightened just by the word "Italian".

* Piantone.  The pinwheel dance, the one with poaching / kidnapping /
sharking / use your own local term for what you do in Hole in the Wall
(no, not "fall into a coma"!).  The music I used was Horses' Bransle
off one of the Musica Subterranea CDs.  I didn't think 2:30 was
anywhere near long enough, but it turned out to be a good duration.
The dance guild leader said that she'll consider it as a frequent
closer dance, because it left people laughing and happy, and I think a
few were panting.  It did get a few people from the edges to join in
after they saw it for a bit.

Note: if you have a few number of couples, make sure the inner circle
are close enough to touch fingers.  We tend to spread out, which is
great for, say, Ly Bens or an alman.  Really bad when the caller says
"four forward" -- you have to run a lap to get there.

* The Milking Payle, from the Pattricke manuscript.
<http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~white/PLD/MilkingPayle.html> This was
the hit of the evening.  6 of us did it once; people asked for a
second time, and a new set of 6 formed.  That may have been the most
number of dancers we had on the floor all evening.  I was a little
surprised, because I expected the sheer amount of setting and turning
to turn people off, or that it's almost Yet Another USA.  Maybe
because it's the relentlessly bouncy tune of "Merry Merry Milkmaids"
(I *like* it).  Maybe we really like to hey.  (We do like us our
Heralds in Love.)  I like that the steps fit the music so well, the
asymmetry of the choruses (yes, they're palindromes and therefore
symmetric, but it's not the cookie-cutter symmetry of "the men do X
and then the women do X"), and because the third verse's "half circle"
instead of arming is a nice change of pace.  I really want to look
more at Pattricke, now that I have my own copy of the proceedings and
can read Dafydd's texts.



I taught each of these in the general practice, not in the
intermediate practice.  I got a request that Ballo del Fiore go into
the intermediate practice for a bit to get people used to it, but I
got other feedback that that's unneeded.

Danyell Lincoln
-- 
Tim McDaniel; Reply-To: tmcd at panix.com