Category: Absolute Beginners

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Discover the dance trick that will blow your mind

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Dancing the Tune!

Biddy Martin’s

Playlist for kid’s class with polka songs and steps

Improvisation!

There is no right or wrong here today. Improvisation is about play and playing with your steps and the music. Mistakes are not mistakes, keep going and exploring.

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• Full variation & creation list document – This is a google document. You can view it and if you want a copy or want to edit it save it to your google drive and you will be able to do anything you like to the document.
• Variations & creation list
• 28 | Tea Time Talk | Improvisation

Step Creation!

Insert a movement – insert a movement or a pattern into the original step. You might have to remove an equal amount of bars to make the step square or you can choose to leave them in and have a step that goes across the bars of music or something that you square off eventually.

• Insert: the Swung side step
  • Insert: one of the reel steps from Spring term.
• Direction: Create something that works for moving in a leadaround pattern.
  • Play with another direction.
• Rearrange the Step: Move the parts of the step around to create a new pattern.
• Rearrange the rhythm – rearrange the step to create a different rhythm.

Full variation & creation list document

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Putting it all together!

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Set Dance steps – Mapped, Half Mapped and Unmapped

You can also apply all of what we have learned over the last 6 weeks to your set dancing. Here’s the Cashel set if you would like to apply this to your set dancing.

Cashel Set – You could map what advance & retire step you might use for the Cashel set. There are other polka sets as well that you could do this with.

Mapped out

Here are a few mapped out options for you to explore.

Roisin Steps to Polkas – Mapped out

• Stamp & Stamp
• Heel & Stab
• Cross Step
• Circle Step
• Zig Zag
• Side Step (3)
• Single Side step
• Heel Toe Heel

Polka steps – Mapped out

• 123’s (with or without heel or tap extra beats)
• 1 & 2 & 123 (with or without heel or tap extra beats)
• Side step (with or without heel or tap extra beats)
• Mick’s Advance & Retire Step
• Kick Up step
• Any trick in polka time with 123’s as the timming step

Half Mapped

Alternate between happed and unmapped. Chose one step to keep going back to or map out a routine and leave everyother 8 bars open.

Unmapped

Unmapped. You can take everything you have learned and dance unmapped. Your steps can be unmapped but if you want some guide rails try picking a few improvisational tricks and dance with them in mind. In class we only danced one at a time as an exercise. The skys the limit. Pick as few or as many as you want to play with. Full variation & creation list document

Putting it all together!

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Continue to work on your routines mapped or unmapped.

Music page – Membership music page. Here you will find many of the tunes on this site in one place. Each tune has a page with resources and downloads. Some tunes have a breakdown of the tune in a spreadsheet that you can use for writing and mapping out steps. If there is a tune that is not done yet and you would like to use it please let me know and I will create a breakdown for you. Over time my hope is to have a breakdown for each tune on the site to make it easy for you to create routines and choreography.

Polka Music Page

Here are a few tunes to get you started.