Pinewoods 6: dancing

[jere7my]

(The astute among you may notice that my mood is no longer "exhausted." I think, I hope, that my bug has finally bugged out. I'm still coughing a bit, but I feel close to human today.)

There's this persistent rumor that people dance at Pinewoods. I tend not to—I go to play music and to socialize and to enjoy the wilderness, and while I enjoy dancing it loses out when it conflicts with any of those three things. I did dance two dances at the formal ball on Friday: Machine without Horses with Kendra, which went very well, and Pelorus Jack with Miriam, which went less well. Other people danced many things, and seemed to enjoy themselves.

Debbie and Louie, South-of-the-Border Night


Dan B. says dancing is keen!

Despite my general lack of dancitude, I do tend to enjoy the formal ball, since everyone looks truly fabulous.

The incomparable Cat P. She looks kinda like Jennifer Garner, no?


K., on the left, and MyS. K. is wearing her formal denim. (K. is often chilly.) Nevertheless, I think she looks really good here.


Miriam, in her lovely shiny home-made skirt. Shiny.


Some guy.

I did see rapper for the first time. Hey kelilah—I get it now. You were right. Rapper is really really cool. Miriam and I enjoyed a command performance in the Pinecones party on Friday night: she and I were ensconced on the couch, and the rapper team (all crewpeople) danced about eight inches away from us, in a very cramped and crowded room in Pinecones. (I tried to pull our legs in tight, but even so one girl brushed my big toe and pretty much went spinning across the room like a rogue firework. Another dancer split her thumb open with one of the swords. Rapper is hazardous, it seems, at least when performed in a confined space.)

For those who don't know, rapper is sort of a high-velocity version of the knot game. It involves a group of people (five?) holding flexible "swords" with swivelling handles at both ends, each sword held by two people. They never release the swords, and under that constraint undertake fabulous acrobatic feats and patterns—backflips, inversions, sweeps, stars, etc.—all while clogging at high speed. Each "dance", as far as I can tell, ends with all five swords linked together into a pentacle, which is then held aloft to mad applause. Sadly, my camera was in my bag on the porch at the time, and I was too impossibly cozy on the couch to get up for it, but if any of you see kelilah I'm sure she'd be happy to pull together an impromptu demo. (Incidentally, I asked one of the Pinewoods rappers, Amelia, if she was familiar with Charles River Rapper, kelilah's group, and she said she was—she's hung out with Hannah, apparently.)

Comments

[kelilah.livejournal.com]

I never noticed that Cat looks a bit like Jennifer Garner before, but I see it now. Perhaps it's because I met Cat before Alias started. Also, she's nice, which is good. And I think that's a nice picture of you, Mr. Some Guy.

I knew I was right about rapper! And I'm glad you agree. Five people is the default; you can't do it with fewer than five (unless it's in extremely unusual situations--with four swords, the lock won't, well, lock, because pairs of the swords will be parallel, and so can't overlap at the handles), but we do have a six-person dance.

The dancer who split her thumb open must have had an ouch on her thumb previously; I've gotten bruises on my hands and scraped knuckles, as has everyone else on my team, but splitting a thumb? Yeeks. However, rapper is *supposed* to be performed in a confined space--it was started by miners who would go and dance in the (small, crowded) pub when they got off work.

Oh, and Amelia is one of the hyphenated-name people (there's at least five of them--it's really funny) on one of the teen teams, I think, so I remember that Hannah knows her.

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

Our longsword team actually has a four-person dance -- to make the lock, we sometimes just do it with four swords (leaving each pair of previously parallel swords crossed at one end, so it's open on the other side and asymmetrical, but it still holds together (which probably wouldn't work with rapper swords)), and sometimes we use a ringer sword that someone grabs and adds in just before the lock (there's a hey just before the end, so it can stay unobtrusively stuck in the ground or leaning somewhere until someone casually grabs it whilst passing through the end lobe of the hey (which also probably wouldn't work so well in rapper, since y'all never let go, right?)). But there are sword dances of some form with only four people that still have locks.

[kelilah.livejournal.com]

(cleaning out the old inbox, found this again, decided to reply)

My point was that rapper swords, because they're so flexible, have to have the handles cross as well as overlapping at some other point of the sword. Longswords are not terribly flexible, which is why making a lock is actually a difficult, impressive thing to do in longsword dancing, and why I'm not surprised you can have a 4-sword longsword lock. Making a lock in rapper, although we do hold up our locks and go "look, aren't we cool?", is basically the first thing you ever learn, and is very, very easy.