Dancing to Slides | Week 5

Variations & Creation: The Clog

We are finally at the point we are putting together a routine or plan for The Clog. There are several approached to this. You may know how you want to approach. If don’t know, not to worry, I’ve got you.

First think about your why. You can have more than one why.

• To teach slides – create steps that you can teach based on the tunes. Develop tools to teach future slides and tunes based on the movements and techniques for creating steps. Start looking at all of the ways to add variation and step creating to create your own rapture that is uniquely your style and how to pass it along to others.
• To perform – you may want to make your routine and steps more visual and excited to watch. Consider using the floor and moving in different directions. Look at more visual steps like crossing over, grapevines, lead arounds….
• Dance Sets – focus on advance and retire steps, slide and change steps and housing around. Practice traveling with all of the steps and movements. Which one works best for you. You can still use the same sheet bellow but come up with a few advance and retire steps and slide and change steps that you like.
• Dance in sessions – You may want to focus on dancing the tune and creating steps that are musical and contained in a small space. I like adding variations of the same sounds to keep me excited about the dancing.
• Have a party piece – you might want to have a mapped out routine that you can get up and dance to slides or these particular slides.
• Be able to improvise with slides – focus on the improvisation ideas over the next few weeks and incorporating them into your dancing.
• Dance the tune – come up with mapped out steps that fit the tune exactly. They can be visual or small and percussive or a bit of both.

Where I like to start when create a piece for a particular tune:

I get a piece of paper out write this:

The Clog	Step or Notes	Bars
A1		8
A1		8
B1		8
B1		8
A2		8
A2		8
B2		8
B2		8
A3		8
A3		8
B3		8
B3		8

Here’s a spread sheet if that’s your jam – one think I like about the spread sheet is the ability to add the link to a video reference should you want that. It could be your own video or one from the course.

In the introduction to the course I talked about having several ways to approach a performance piece or dancing a tune. Mapped out, half mapped, un mapped. As we go through this process decide which one you would like to focus on. If you are just starting out mapping the whole thing might be a good place to start and then as you get more comfortable with the routine start to dance is less mapped. It’s up to you.

I have several tricks and tools to create variation in your steps. Here’s is my master list for step creation and variation:

• Direction
  • You can change a step and create interest by moving it in different directions.
  • Try dancing a step in place, sideways, circle around self, circle around stage, zig zag, forward and back and at angles. Which one do you like?
• Phrasing or Space
  • Try adding a pause or leave beats out in your step. Adding breath to the step. Musicians will do this, especially flute players and singers. Take a note from them and see if this works with your steps. Let parts of the music come thought and dance the basic pulse rather than every note.
• Length of Phrases or movements
  • Play with the length of a phrase: 8bars/4bars/2bars/1bars.
• Emphasis
  • Emphasis one movement over the other. Swinging the beat and moving into different parts of the music.
• Dynamics
  • Soft to aggressive
• Creating multiple steps that have same rhythmic phrase
  • take a musical phrase and see how many different ways you can make that sound. This gives you lots of options when creating a step. Think about it in small chunks 2 or 4 bar phrases that you can swap in and out as you like. This will help you immensely when creating steps and improvising steps.
• Pitch or Tone
  • Dancing steps on your toes or heels, high, low or deep sounds. 
• Rearrange Step / Rhythmic variation 
  • Moving the Stamp, Step or heel to different parts of the step and music. 
• Weight
  • Keep weight the same with hop or tap and transfer step to the other foot.
• Shifting the Beat
  • Start your step 1 beat over from where you normally would. Try ddd a beat to the step and/or removing a beat. This will move the movements over into different parts of the music. Very fun!
• One sided only
  • Dance movements only on one side right only, then left only. Sometimes this can create a very interesting step.
• Dancing the Tune
  • Crafting steps for a particular tune.
• Echoing the tune
  • playing a rhythmical call and response with the tune and musician.
• The Player
  • Getting to know the playing of a particular player and adapting to them. You can do this by listening to your local musicians live or recorded. Also your favorite musicians. Get to know how a musician plays and what they are likely to do with a tune. Learn their tunes or their style.
• The Instrument
  • What each instrument is capable of and what is interesting to you about each one. 
  • Watch the player and dance off of them. You can do this on youtube if you don’t have a player nearby. 
  • The Breath of flute player, whistle player, singer
  • Dancing to the bow of a fiddler.
  • the bellows of an accordion player.
  • the regulators of a piper. 
• A Band
  • Dancing to multiple instruments and arrangements. 
• Time Signature
  • Changing the time signature of a step
• Tempo
  • Tempo of a particular tune, dance or style is played at. What sounds good to you? 
  • Reels 110-120, Slides 130-140?
• Context
  • The context in which you dance or want to dance: a session, the stage, personal enjoyment, party piece, house parties…
• Endurance
  • Work on endurance. Dancing at full temp for 30 minutes, dancing a whole show with all of your dance pieces in one set (make a playlist for your show). Jump roping, like boxers, to build up endurance, stamina and quick feet.

Time Signature

One of the ways to create a new step is to take a step you already know in one time signature and put it into another. When taking a reel step and turning into into a jig or slide step you have a few options.

1. Reel into Jig: take one beat away (i.e. 4 sounds becomes 3 sounds 123123123123). Example of this way is the “step shuffle hop back” changing it into “step shuffle step shuffle step shuffle step” (taking away the hop).
2. Reel into Jig: add 2 beats or squishing the movement into jig time (4 sounds becomes 6 sounds 123456123456). The example of this is Mick’s step bellow. This route make the step a bit harder to dance, but with practice most of them end up being really interesting steps and worth the hard work to get them up to speed.

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