Category: Irish Set Dancing

Day 3 | Improvisation

Unleash Your Creativity with Improvisation! Join us for Day 3 as we delve into improvisation tricks and tips, demystifying the process. By the end of our session, I aim to transform improvisation from a daunting concept to a creative tool that inspires you to develop your unique style with confidence.

• Tea Time Talk – Improvisation (an hour long talk on improvisation)
• Course on Improvisation (Maldon Meehan Dance Members only)

Here are some ideas to get you started with improvising. We will cover a few of them in the day 3 workshop.

• Direction – Experiment with direction to add interest to your dancing. Move in place, sideways, circle around yourself or the stage, zigzag, form squares, advance and retire, and play with angles. Some steps work well moving, and others are better stationary. Play around and see what you like!
• Phrasing or Space – Putting in a pause or leave beats out of a step. This ads breath. I often add more space when dancing to a flute or whistle player. Adding a pause where they take a breath.
• Length of phrases or movements – try breaking rhythms into 8-bar, 4-bar, 2-bar, and 1-bar movements. As you become familiar with the steps, you’ll naturally think in these rhythmic phrases. When learning new tunes, you’ll recognize these phrases within the music, making it easier to recall and dance to the rhythm. Irish musicians do this with tunes and many of the same patterns appear in different tunes. Thinking in smaller chunks of music can aid in learning and dancing to unfamiliar tunes. As you learn these chunks some of your work will already be done when you take a new tune.
• Emphasis – Emphasis one movement or beat over the other. Swinging the beat and moving into different parts of the music.
• Shifting the Beat – Explore improvisation possibilities with the double stamp technique in the Connemara step. By incorporating double stamping, you can initiate rhythmic patterns in four unique sections within a music bar. Experiment with applying this technique to any step and at any point within it. Delve into starting a beat later in the tune, adding or removing beats from different parts of the step. This is one of my favorite things to play with.
• Dynamics – Improvise your dance by playing with dynamics. Explore the art of dancing with varying volumes, from soft and gentle to bold and aggressive.
• Pitch or Tone – Pitch and tone in music can be brought out in your dancing by using the different parts of your feet. For example toes for high sounds and heels low, or deep sounds. I enjoy playing with this concept in tunes that have contrasting parts – a low A section followed by a high B section. Sometimes, I’ll dance the same step on my heels and then on my toes to play with tone.
• Rearrange Step / Rhythmic variation – Rearrange Step a step to create rhythmic variation. Move parts of a step around to create a new step or rhythm.
• Weight -keep weight the same with hop or tap and transfer step to the other foot. This allows you more freedom to play and move between patterns with ease.
• One sided only –dance movements only on one side. Like dancing a bunch of shuffles with just one foot.
• Dancing the Tune – crafting steps for a particular tune or learning the tune with your feet. This can be mapped out as well as done on the spot.
• Chasing the tune or Echoing the tune – I love this one! Often times if you don’t know a tune yet you can take dance the rhythmic phrase you just heard, but dance it in the next part of the tune. This can help you get the tune down or give you a call and response in the tune.
• The Player –knowing the playing of a particular player and dancing in conversation with them. If you know anyone who can play music with you try using YouTube. You can find a nice recording of a musician on YouTube and watch them play and play with them. This is particularly rewarding when you and the musician are listening and watching and playing in conversation with each other. Some very amazing improvisation can come from this.
• The Instrument – exploring 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. This is amazing and very fun in person with another musician but again if you don’t have that opportunity you can do this using video recordings from YouTube.
• A Band – dancing to a full band and arranged music.
• Time Signature – changing the time signature of a step.
• Tempo – play with dancing a different tempos. Often we dance to slower tempos when learning and then graduate to faster tempos. But there are some tune, step and dances that just feel very different and different tempos. For our classes we tend to work with 60, 80, 100, and 120 bpm. Went dancing reels I really like dancing around 110 bpm and find that 120 is too fast for me to do some of the play that make dancing so fun.
• Context – dancing at a session, on stage, for personal enjoyment, a party piece, in class, teaching or busking. This can inform your improvisation as well and change the way you dance.

Day 4 | Step Creation (choreography)

Step Creation ideas

• Vocabulary – mixing and matching vocabulary movements and rhythmic steps (i.e. Connemara step, 6 heels, finishing step). You will find a vocabulary playlist under the resource tab.
• 8 bar step – mixing and matching 1 bar, 2 bar and 4 bar patterns to make an 8 bar step.
• Taking an existing step and inserting a different pattern into the 8 bar step. (removing a movement to make this work). As you do this it might change the step or the weight change and you can decided how you want to proceed with each part before or after the new movement.
• Dancing the tune – listening to a tune and tapping out the melody and rhythm of the tune with your hands or heels. I like to keep this simple in at the start so that I am only focusing on the sounds and not worrying about how I will move yet. Then once have a pattern that you like, try dancing it different ways to make that sound with your feet. Pick one you like and work with that. Often I keep this one sided and repeat it so that I don’t have to worry about to many weight changes yet. Once I have a pattern that I like and have it in my feet then I attempt to put it on the other foot or make it two sided.
• Looking for where to start exploring tunes? Try TheSession.org, YouTube, Spotify or your own music collections. The session.org is great for finding sheet music, recordings and variations of tunes. I often will use the sheet music or the midi recording (on repeat and slowed down) to help me learn the tune. This is especially helpful if the tune I want to learn is in a set of tunes and it’s hard to just listen to the one tune on repeat. I don’t read sheet music well at all, but I use the sheet music to see the rhythmic structure of the tune. The whole notes, quarter notes and eight notes. This can help me in a tricky spot of the tune where I can’t figure out what it happening or I want to double check what I am hearing on a recording. I use this purely as a rhythmic tool. (One day I will learn to read sheet music and use it as a melodic tool). I tell you this because if you don’t read music you can still use this tool.
• I have loads of playlists on my YouTube and Spotify channels and you are very welcome to save them and use them. As I find tunes that I like I add them to these playlists.
• Maldon’s YouTube channel – look under playlists. When you go to my page, click on ‘playlists’ to see them all. I have a lot of playlist on YouTube so if you want to find music or dancers quickly “music” or “dance” they will come up.
• Maldon’s Spotify channel – look under playlists. Most of the playlists are organized my tune type.

Betsy Branch on Fiddle