One of the things I do in my copious free time is co-lead the GCD demo team. And one of the team's favorite performance venues is Neffa.
There are lots of different types of dance demos: demos where you're trying to attract new dancers so you don't want to look so perfect and polished that people shy away, performances for a mixed audience that you want to look good, but mostly convey that you are together and having a good time, and lastly performances for dancers who actually know what they are looking at.
Neffa is the latter type of performance. We have 10 minutes to shine on the stage on Saturday night, 1o minutes to dance well and impress our fellow dance aficionados. In that small space of time we pack in 5-6 dances (no more than 3 times each), and choreography in-between to move us about the stage, create different set shapes, and transition us from one dance to the next, and from one dance style and mood to the next.
Creating this demo is a fun challenge. We have to think about:
- Partnering - do we have the right combinations of people in the dances
- Program - what dances show well, have good music, and don't bore people too quickly
- Balance - of dance types, meters, keys, formations, tempos, moods
- Transitions - that all important glue between dances
- Timeliness - if we go over 10 minutes, we might get in trouble with the chapter up there
We're just in the earliest planning stages here, but we know we have 5.5 couples - 11 good dancers to work with.
Here are some of the dances we're thinking about:
- Halfe Hannikin/Dargason - a medley I came up with
- Noisette
- Stepping Stones
- Henry's Other Hornpipe
- Nonesuch, Never Love Thee More or some other snippet of something
- Some set dance or other, undoubtedly
Any other dances we should think about?
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