Tune in! You are invited to join me for a special summertime tune exploration on daily at 9am. We will be exploring the the connection between steps and tunes.
Summer tune challenge! You pick, a tune a day, a tune a week or a tune a month. You’ll never be able to dance them all, but this summer you can at least get close with our tune challenge.
My own challenge is a tune a day. Every morning I’m going for one hour of dance practice in order learn and create steps to accompany a collection of traditional Irish tunes. They won’t all be gems, but my goal it to get better and better at creating steps for tunes. Over the summer I will share those steps and tunes with you.
From Daily from 9AM-9:30AM PST join me for some friendly guidance on dancing the tune.
Tune Challenge (Guided Chaos) – 25 min
This tune challenge came about from the idea of learning a tune a day. The summer goal is to work on learning by ear a tune a day and creating steps to go to that tune. The sessions will be 25 minutes of guided tune learning and step creation. We may not get through a whole tune in the 25 minutes. The idea is to build your skills learning to dance by ear and to build your repertuar of traditional Irish tunes. I will be dancing everyday and you are welcome to join me live daily or weekly. Up to you how many tunes you want to tackle this summer.
I approach my personal sean-nós dance practice like a musician. I think of myself as a percussionist or a backer when dancing to tunes. That approach means I am not always the most visual stage dancer, but rather a session player and a player of tunes.
Great backers in Irish music know the tunes. When listening to an album or a session it is a joy when the guitar, piano, bouzouki or bodhran player knows the tune. As dancers we are no different. There are so many tunes to learn and this can be a daunting task. My goal this summer is to guide you and myself through this process. I invite you to join me live or view the recordings at your leisure.
Depending on my schedule there may be a few days that the practice is not live on zoom and I will encourage you to play one of the previous classes or practice your tunes on your own on that day.
I call this guided chaos as we will be learning tunes by ear and each interrupting them into our feet. Utilizing sean-nós steps and vocabulary we will set steps to each of these tunes.
Tune Challenge: Week 1
Week 1 Playlist – here is a Spotify playlist of the week one tunes played by a variety of artists. Week one included: Cooley’s, Silver Spear, Winnie Haye’s, Cuz Teahan’s, An Rógaire Dubh, Sligo Duke, James McMahon’s and John Brennan’s.
Here is a playlist to practice to with all of the sites recordings for the week.
