29 Apr
2013
29 Apr
'13
2:57 p.m.
On Sat, 27 Apr 2013 15:25:37 -0700, Alan Winston wrote:
My sense from reading your notes is that Zesty
Playford is what I'd
think of (as an American who has danced English in the SF Bay Area,
Boston, etc) as good English dancing with extra playfulness.
I'm not sure that some Americans would class it as "good", since it
isn't the way they've been taught to dance English.
Questions: Is "Playford" the Brit usage
where you mean what US
means by "English" dancing? (Since the linked video is of Jenny
Pluck Pears, which fits both categories, I couldn't tell.)
Yes it is. To us, "English" also includes "Traditional English" such
as Morpeth Rant and Cumberland Square Eight.
My brief experience of "Extreme" /
"Trash" English was that it was
really specifically an attempt to bring US-urban-contra aesthetic
to English dance / music. Music could be played sleazily, etc -
but with energy. Lots of twirls/flourishes.
(In the video I was seeing some improv - in one set the women did
an elbows-linked back-basket, which I'd never seen before - but not
so much contra-style flourishes. [Which I think are generally
great in contra but must be used sparingly in English lest you lose
the satisfaction in fitting the geography to the music.] So I'm
arguing that Extreme English seems not quite to be the same thing.
I'd like to see all English over here be more Zesty.)
I agree with all of that. Contra dancers in England don't do nearly
as many twirls as in the States. And I would guess that most of the
people in that video also dance contra. I've never seen an
elbows-linked back-basket before either! I imagine it was
spontaneous.
Colin Hume