Sean-nós & Set Dance with Maldon
Specializing in easy to follow step by step instruction for all levels
| A | Maldon’s A Step |
| A | Maldon’s A Step |
| B | Maldon’s B Step |
| B | Maldon’s B Step |
| A2 | |
| A2 | |
| B2 | |
| B2 | |
| A3 | |
| A3 | |
| B3 | |
| B3 |
Endurance – 15-30 min (depending on the style/material)
Our Endurance sessions will vary in length depending on the style of dance and material. I will create a playlist of tunes/dances that we will dance at full tempo. You can follow along with the specific dance or you can just dance to the music with the steps you have. Think of this as a full rehearsal of material or session dancing. The idea is to build up your endurance as if you were on stage dancing a full performance.
A summer of old-style step dance!
Woodshed – 25 min
Woodshedding is back! Woodshedding is a term musicians use when referring to practicing and working on specific parts of a tune. We will be doing this with our dancing.
The woodshedding sessions focus on one step or technique from class. We will drill material from class and work on tone, tenquice and speed. You can attend live or recorded. Each of these sessions will be good practice sessions to accompany your class. Over the years I have found that the biggest challenge for students is practicing. This is why I have decided to offer guided practice. My hope is to help you build the habit of practicing by offering accountability and videos to guide you. Over time as you build this habit you may find yourself creating your own practicing sessions and developing a daily habit of practice. But that is the future down the road, I will do all the work of planning a daily practice.
Old-Style
Keep Her Lit – 25 min
Keep Her Lit sessions are back as well. These sessions are designed to help you keep your reputaru fresh and ready to do. We will be rehearsing complete dances from past courses. We will work on having clean transitions and perfecting a whole dance for performance or dancing in sessions.
Woodshed – 25 min
Woodshedding is back! Woodshedding is a term musicians use when referring to practicing and working on specific parts of a tune. We will be doing this with our dancing.
The woodshedding sessions focus on one step or technique from class. We will drill material from class and work on tone, tenquice and speed. You can attend live or recorded. Each of these sessions will be good practice sessions to accompany your class. Over the years I have found that the biggest challenge for students is practicing. This is why I have decided to offer guided practice. My hope is to help you build the habit of practicing by offering accountability and videos to guide you. Over time as you build this habit you may find yourself creating your own practicing sessions and developing a daily habit of practice. But that is the future down the road, I will do all the work of planning a daily practice.
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.
Here are some of the tunes we will be drawing from:
Click on the tune name to reach the tune page where you can find music downloads and the zoom recordings for each tune. We will gradually work our way through these tunes.
Tunes to try on your own
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.
Our first tune we will be exploring is Biddy Martins.
Here are all the steps that will accompany this course:
Connemara Reels – broken down videos of each step along with practice videos. Also included are past zooms covering this material. Videos ranging from 5 minutes to an hour.