Day-making ice skating

Apropos my ice skating reference in the previous post, thank you Detlef for sharing this absolutely beautiful performance from the European Figure Skating Championships, by Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron, of France:

Gabriella PAPADAKIS & Guillaume CIZERON - 2016 European Champi...

Gabriella PAPADAKIS & Guillaume CIZERON - 2016 European Championships - FD

Posted by Ice Skating World on Thursday, 4 February 2016

Absolutely beautiful. Not a moment or a movement without meaning. Not a transition in sight. And you'll notice the commentator stops talking, after a while.

Update: I would draw your attention to this interesting interview with their coach from last year.

Musicality with Dawn Hampton and John Dokes (Swing)

My favourite thing about this video is that the band is LIVE and both of them still dance as though they know every split second of the music. Because they understand it as dance music, and so does the band, and they're all paying attention to each other, and when you cooperate and you understand the form and what each other are doing, you don't need to know exactly what's coming next.



For example: at 00:50, the feigned surprise is funny because he completely hit that, and that's why he seemed like a leaf on the wind of sound. And at 05:05, again.

The band would appear to be The George Gee Jump, Jivin' Wailers of New York City.

I've posted this video before, in 2009. It still makes me happy - it might make you happy, too.

Affordances

I was in a café where they hand out those buzzing things that tell you when your order is ready, so you can come to the counter and collect it. All they do is buzz and flash little red LED lights to attract your attention, then keep buzzing till you hand them back in exchange for your meal.

A young man was chatting with his friend when the thing buzzed. Startled, he jumped up, at the same time seizing the buzzer, staring at it intently and tapping its insensible plastic face, as though half his brain knew it was time to fetch the food and the other half thought an acknowledgement would materialise it in front of him. Or at any rate, knew how to react to a rectangular hand-sized buzzing thing that wanted its attention.

Both of them fell about laughing and he entered into the joke by waving it about and lifting it to his ear.

I regularly try to wave my Oyster* card at my front door; at least half the doors and gates in my life open when you wave things at them, and it is an effort to remember that this one requires a physical key.

In my place of work there are so many doors that behave in totally different ways. There are a few normal doors that you push or pull. There are doors that you wave a card at, and they slide open. There are doors that you wave a card at, and they open on a hinge, but very, very cautiously, so that thin people go in first. There is a door consisting of two glass blades that meet in the middle, which requires you to wave a card at it, and is so very like the barriers on the Tube that I always reach for my Oyster card; except that the LED "go" or "stop" display means something totally different and contradictory.

There is a worrying kind of glass revolving door, such that you have to wave your card at it to unlock it, then step into a little 45-degree pocket, whereupon it starts revolving, and you shuffle very slowly around to be spat out at the other side. On no account must you push anything, since if you do it will panic, freeze, and trap you like a fish in a tank, so the security guard will have to come and press buttons to let you out.

There are two variations of a subtly different kind of revolving door that does exactly the same thing, except that it starts revolving when you get close enough (there's no indication of where you have to stand, or what is going to happen). One of those has a green button nearby that looks as though it might be a "request to exit" button; if you press it, the door gets stroppy and freezes, much to the annoyance of the people outside trying to get in. There are also some old-fashioned revolving doors that you just push; so that you stand there like a lemon trying to guess what you're meant to do.

And almost all these doors behave differently depending on whether you are going out or coming in. There are many doors where you have to do something to unlock them, and then do something else to open them, such as push or pull, with all the possible confusion that entails - but not too quickly, and not too slowly. Different doors I meet in the course of my day's work require staff cards issued by two different companies, both of which I am supposed to wear in a visible way (unless I am crossing the road between buildings, in which case I am advised to conceal them). But you cannot keep these two cards in the same container, because then they stop working. Neither can you keep any of them with your Oyster card, or that will stop working, too.

I am always standing in front of doors and hunting around for the "Open, Sesame" buttons that mean "unlock, I want to get out". They all look different from each other, and they're never in the same place twice.

It's a DOOR. You're not supposed to have to read the instructions.

The world is so confusing. No wonder it makes us nervous and inexplicably vexed.

* For non-Londoners, the Oyster card is the electronic ticket card that pays for bus journeys and opens barriers on the Tube.

Dance Participation

This one took a while.

Pineapple Studios is a building in Covent Garden, London, with several floors of dance studios, changing rooms and a café. The deal is that you pay a daily entry fee to the studios, and then pay the teachers whatever they charge for whatever particular classes you take. (You can join Pineapple, and not pay the entry fee, which works out cheaper if you visit more than once a week).

At the desk, they have A4 leaflets, folded twice, printed all over in very small print with the full weekly timetable, classified into levels along the lines of "Beginner", "Elementary", "Intermediate", "General", "Advanced" and "Professional", with mixtures and variations.

I picked up the leaflet recently, and on the Tube home, I started to count the different kinds of classes, got rather interested, and thought I would make you a chart.

To create the charts below, I typed out the name of each of the 266 classes offered in the timetable, and made a fairly vague, best-guess classification, first by looking at the words in their names and then by manually classifying the ones that didn't work for. I've totally ignored Pineapple's own classification on their website.

By "World" I mean anything characterised by a specific place of origin. Those dances have nothing else in common. This includes Brazilian Samba, Irish Dance for Performance, Island (Polynesian) Rhythms, Flamenco, Salsa, Bhangra Grooves, Bollywood Dance London, Capoeira and Egyptian Dance. It would include Argentine Tango if there was any, but in this particular leaflet there isn't a class listed. So the "World" bar in the charts doesn't tell you very much. It could equally reasonably be seen as a lot of little tiny bars - all these dances appear once or twice each.

"Street" is a very, very vague classification including Break Dance, Popping, Locking, Waacking, and a few things I'm not too sure about such as "New Skool". There are also two or three wild guesses in there.

You could dispute lots of things and do the classification lots of different ways. It depends what you're trying to do. Here, the only thing I am trying to do is get a general impression of how many people every week want to take what sorts of dance class, to see if I could learn anything from that.

A lot of classes fall into more than one category, like "Commercial Jazz" and "Ballet-Based Body Conditioning". That means double-counting, and it raises the total count from 266 to 296. There was one class, Singing, that only happened once a month - this is classified under "Music/Stage" along with a couple of other classes apparently designed for people appearing in musicals.

Here's the first pass:

On a second pass, after a quick Google, it seemed to me that perhaps I should add together "Street" and "Hip-Hop", and perhaps also "House", as a broader classification of closely related (but living and rapidly evolving) styles. If you do that, something interesting happens; taken together, they almost catch up with "Jazz". If you added "Commercial" as well, they would comfortably overtake "Jazz". But I feel as though the reasons you would do "Commercial" are different from the reasons you would do "Street" or "Hip-Hop", even though they might be physically similar, or even danced to some of the same music. I could be completely wrong about that, though.

Another interesting thing: Ballet is very popular. In fact, that's what inspired me to do this. I noticed how often the word "Ballet" came up, and wondered why we don't see more of it in mainstream culture. Many, many adults and children participate in a ballet class every week. It's popular. How come it's so invisible to non-participants?

Carole tells me that a lot of adults who are mainly interested in other dance forms, do ballet for body conditioning, and also to plug themselves in to the traditional European language of dance; if you work as a dancer, it's extremely useful to know, and to have other people know that you know, what a plié is. Those things still make it very influential; it seems strange to me that it doesn't somehow come up more often as a thing that people are interested in and do. But maybe I'm wrong, and it does; I don't really watch TV.

266 classes a week, with say 10-20 people in each class, is a lot of participation. This is just one place, Pineapple Studios - albeit a rather unique place, right in London theatreland, with an extraordinarily long, easy-to-analyse class list.

But I suspect there are many, many adults all over the country who regularly dance for their own enjoyment, and not that many of them ever have any intention to perform, professionally or otherwise. Even at Pineapple, 80% of the people in my weekly samba class (about 19 out of 20 of us are usually women) probably have no such intention and are doing it purely for fun and fitness. Why, I was wondering, does dancing for its own sake not seem that mainstream, plus-or-minus Zumba? Why is dance not something that people talk about at the water cooler, much, the way they do about their Sunday-league football adventures? Strictly Come Dancing has done a certain amount to change this, but it's essentially a ballroom programme, with a mindset that sees dance mainly as a stage performance rather than a regular mainstream recreation. And only about five of the classes listed are partner dances at all.

It made me think. But I don't have any conclusions for you.

Carole's Dance Photography Blog

Upside-Down Isaac and the Dreamers are Carole's copyright,
used with permission for this post alone.

My friend Carole the Photographer, who quite a few of you know, has started a new blog with new and back-catalogue photographs of all kinds of dance. She's adding some words in each case about the photo - what the technical challenges were, what she was trying to achieve, anything relevant about the dance, whether she was happy with it, what the event was - the kind of thing that would be interesting to photographers and artists as well as dancers.

At the moment she's working through a series on tango, with words about how her attempts to capture it in pictures have evolved with her perception of the dance itself.

She specialises in dance, and is one of the best out there. For just the tango click here, or the home page is here. But I recommend going right from the start and just clicking "Newer Post" a lot, or clicking the classifications on the right. All images currently works better than Archive.

Her photos are all available for sale in various forms - magazines would be the usual market, but she does fine art exhibitions, too. She's working on a system for people to order prints, but for the next few weeks, if you're interested in that, just leave a comment (there, not here!). Her large-form photographs of an Australian Aboriginal dance festival that she was invited to photograph are still on display at Zero Sette near the ExCel exhibition centre. Have a look.

The one in this post (used with permission) is my personal favourite so far.

Hah, a small victory (Magalenha)

The Samba Lady pretended, at the end of the class, that she was going to have us do the basic samba step at sprint speed from where the drums come in at 00:45 to the end of Magalenha.



She stopped the music before half way through because too much of the class had dropped out. But I already knew I could do it, because I'd practiced it at home until I could, and that blonde on the left is not going to get the better of me. Hah.

I don't think what I did makes a lot of sense,  musically speaking, and I think the rhythm in this song also has another name, as well as samba, that I can't remember. Most people seem to call it samba, however, and sambaing to it right through at the faster of the two possible speeds is a very good aerobic workout, at least if you remember to breathe, which was why I did it. It's a wonderfully infectious song that keeps you moving pretty much regardless of what you do.

This performance I think is really beautiful:

Dance is not necessarily Art

When people dance at parties or in nightclubs, they are not making art. People dance to celebrate good luck, or to encourage their team, or for religious purposes, or because it's what they do, like the round dance they do in Catalonia on Sundays. I don't think any of that is art. But all these things are timeless and common and part of daily life.

Sometimes I enjoy watching good dancers dance, but that doesn't mean they have any artistic intent, and it doesn't mean that I am doing the same thing as someone consuming art.

There's nothing wrong with artistic dance. Lots of dance is certainly art. But it is wrong to talk as though dance is necessarily performance, and that non-artistic, non-performance dance is some sort of inferior 'just-for-fun' offshoot, defined as low-quality, because high-quality dance would be art. This belief does real harm to people who would enjoy non-art dance and be good at it, and real harm to dance communities.

The concerns, priorities and purposes of art are totally different from my concerns, priorities and purposes when I'm dancing, and they're mostly incompatible. This is a problem that non-art dancers have to solve when they are asked to give a demonstration to satisify other people's (totally reasonable) curiosity - a problem tackled by Elizabeth here and by Melina here. I like performances that solve this problem well and inform the curious without without misinforming them. It's not easy to do, it requires thought and self-awareness as well as empathy with the audience.

You see this unexamined assumption, that dance is a subset of art, in virtually all mainstream-media references to dance. It irritates me how non-art dance - surely the majority of all dance, considered worldwide - is either presupposed out of existence, or horribly deformed by a totally imaginary requirement that it make sense as a performance.

There should be more people dancing, more commonly, than there are, without being obliged to feel all artistic about it. And without feeling that if they ever get good, they'll automatically be artists and expected to teach or perform. Those are all totally different vocations and have no necessary connection with each other, or with just dancing. They're not needed to validate the quality of anyone's dance. (And they don't, incidentally).

Being an excellent social (or indeed solo, or religious, or football-terrace) dancer is a valid and possible goal, and it's always nice to have more of them.

Chacarera

As discussed on the train  ... some links.

• Video playlist that walks you through most of the basic steps really, really s-l-o-w-l-y (in very easy Spanish) so you can learn them. Half an hour of this is pretty good exercise, actually.
• Monica Paz demonstrating the whole thing. Includes the bit at the end not demonstrated in the previous playlist, and shows much more clearly how it fits the music.
• Clear drawings of the whole procedure in sweet little old-time cartoony pictures, with ...
• list of the steps in order - and also the longer chacarera doble
• Diagram of chacarera doble, with little curly lines showing where you're supposed to be, instead of the cartoons.

For those who weren't on that particular train, this is a country dance in 6/8 (or I think of it more as groups of 4 triple measures) danced in a line formation with specific steps in a fixed order, so if you want to join in you just have to learn them and practice at home till they can't go wrong. People play it sometimes at milongas, Beto sometimes plays it after the end at Aldenham. It's much cooler if you can keep the lines straight, so some of us were half-arranging to practice it together.

The most likely 'gotcha' looks to me like the full (swapping places) turn and the introduction being sometimes over eight and sometimes over only six measures. (Is it consistent, so the introduction would tell us which?)

First album I found on itunes, as far as I can tell from the previews this seems to have at least one example where the full turn is over only 6 measures:
Los Mejores 13 - Folklore - Chacarera - Various Artists

Another digression, and return, via Flamenco

Part of what fascinates me about this (I can't look away), apart from its sheer excellence, is that she is also the principal source and leader of the music. It's more like shamanism than dancing. This woman generates stupefying power.



It's possible that what appeals to me most about every dance that appeals to me is the shamanistic aspect - the trance, the flow. Everything from the Haka to the tango. When they don't have this, I don't really care about them.

Thanks to Andreas for sending me the link and pointing out the "stop now" flick of the hand at 00:45. The YouTube comments (in Spanish) inform us that she died a few months later; and also that she was a pioneer, and broke with the concept of flamenco-light for women. I have no idea whether any of that is true.

Dance and Male Quality in the Biology Letters

Good Dancing may be sign of Male Health, Scientists Say - BBC:

Dr [Nick] Neave [of Northumbria University] asked young men who were not professional dancers, to dance in a laboratory to a very basic drum rhythm and their movements with 12 cameras.

These movements were then converted into a computer-generated cartoon - an avatar - which women rated on a scale of one to seven. He was surprised by the results.

"We thought that people's arms and legs would be really important. The kind of expressive gestures the hands [make], for example. But in fact this was not the case," he said.

"We found that (women paid more attention to) the core body region: the torso, the neck, the head. It was not just the speed of the movements, it was also the variability of the movement. So someone who is twisting, bending, moving, nodding."

Movements that went down terribly were twitchy and repetitive - so called "Dad dancing".

In the video at that link, Dr. Neave adds:

"The head and the neck and the torso can move around three different angles - forwards and backwards, side to side, turn around - and somebody who's putting all those moves together, in a different way, and making them sometimes big and sometimes small, and showing variability, and flexibility, and creativity in the way that they move their head and their neck and their body, they will be percieved as a good dancer. A bad dancer is someone who engages in very rigid, stereotypical movements. A head nod - a headbanger, for example, is a bad dancer."

Makes sense to me, huh. In so many ways.

I know that science reporting is often pretty dodgy. But in in this case they do tell us what journal the article is in, the Royal Society Biology Letters, which allows me to check the abstract and say that the news article doesn't go much beyond the abstract itself, which (in part) says this:

Linear regression subsequently revealed that three movement measures were key predictors of dance quality; these were variability and amplitude of movements of the neck and trunk, and speed of movements of the right knee. In summary, we have identified specific movements within men's dance that influence women's perceptions of dancing ability. We suggest that such movements may form honest signals of male quality in terms of health, vigour or strength, though this remains to be confirmed.

Indeed, it's possible that moving the core body region in a controlled, varied, creative and twisty way is just genuinely quite difficult, which I think is what they're saying with the technical sense of "honest", and certainly doesn't contradict my personal experience (hello, confirmation bias).

In fact I have several questions about this, such as how the subjects rated their own dancing, how other males rated the dancing, whether there was any definition of dancing, and whether the researchers went beyond the distinction between 'professional' and otherwise. Part of the abstract I didn't quote also implies that the dance of men was found to be more informative than the dance of women, and it would be interesting to know if that was true, or if they didn't measure any female subjects for some reason, or if there just wasn't enough difference between female subjects they measured to be able to tell. I also wonder what the overall goal of the study was and whether it's part of a wider programme of research. The article will be available for free in a year's time; at the moment it costs a rather eye-popping £27, which I don't think I can justify.

And also, why the right knee? Did it matter if they were left-handed? In fact, can you tell from someone's dancing if he's left-handed or not? I know you can with at least some beginner tangueros, who (I remember noticing) if not given definite instruction or obstruction sometimes start with a motion to the right instead of the stereotypical leftward weight-change.

A little bit more digging finds two videos from the study.





There's a lot more in the Letters about animal locomotion, although I don't think any of it changes the lots-of-data-and-no-theory situation.

Total Connection (Salon Swing)

Connection - this is it. Miss Dawn Hampton, and John Dokes, again. Each other, and the music.

Actually Good

The thing that really hits me, watching this again, is the ludicrous contrast between Miss Hampton and Mr. Dokes, and all the other dancers you can see. Is he doing anything particularly fancy, fast or physically demanding? No, I don't think so, and neither would you if the lady were 80 years old. But they seem to be in a completely different world from everyone else visible — except the band. Especially towards the end, from about 04:30, where the youngsters seem to be thrashing around more and more like ‘brute beasts that have no understanding’, while everything Dokes and Hampton do is there for a reason.



It gets more and more revelatory to me every time I watch someone Actually Good.

Of course Mr. Dokes can dance more energetically: here he is again, with a plainly delighted young lady (Denise See). But he still always knows when it's time to stop one thing and do something else, or just stop.



Dance is playing Air-Sax, Air-Drums, or Air-Bandoneón with your whole body, each instrument infinitely mutable in shape and function, but keeping its sound.

More reasons to dance (not necessarily tango)

Some time ago I wrote a little bit about why I dance tango.

Now Ampster has a nice piece about why he does. Some of it's the same and some of it's different.

I noticed that, like at least two others of my readers, he is or was also a student of martial arts, not at all uncommon among male tango dancers. At a certain point I wonder if they sometimes think "I could be grappling with this big hairy twerp trying to kill me, or I could have a beautiful woman in my arms, and the technical difficulty level and time commitment is about the same. Where did I put my brain?" But I merely speculate.

Ampster: Hobby for the old and broken: Its a vernacular that I feel special knowing. Its something that I can make people happy with, one partner at a time. Its a hobby that doesn't involve danger, combat, serious physical injury, pain, trauma, nor booming things. ... Most of all, its a hobby I can share with my beloved Mrs. Ampster.

One of the reasons we have in common is that many hobbies can be rather isolating. In his case, he wants to share with Mrs. Ampster. In my case, I have always had a tendency to be shy, and I have to actively take measures to reduce the harm that causes me. Social dancing is a very good approach. I definitely feel the same satisfaction in making other people happy, one at a time. It's pleasant and gives me confidence. But perhaps more importantly, it makes me happy. Because the dancing has real interest and challenge and and joy in itself I feel motivated to stick with it even when I am anxious, and that builds confidence too and gives me a chance to manage the anxiety and get comfortable with people, at least to a point I can work from. I'd certainly suggest some kind of social dancing, not necessarily this one - I think you should pick the one that appeals to you personally - to people who are habitually shy. You can make a decision that you're going to do it and then just stick at it, going to a class every week, and it has a certain structure and boundary to it as well as a sense of achievement and as well as being fun in itself. It has its own little world that you can find a place in. The fact that it's not easy means your mind is occupied with the task and not feeling bored or selfconscious. You can still hide at other times if you want to, or not, if having the practice inspires you to seek people out a bit more.

[Update: and twenty minutes later, he says more. I particularly like the bit about making friends you just happen to like.]

Salon Swing

Dawn Hampton and John Dokes. Never you mind what dance we dance, let's watch, listen, learn.



And more of a birthday dance (really good) here. She's 80.

Tango Fire @ Peacock Theatre

I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected. It's an hour and a half of live tango music, with a singer, eight dancers, some pretty costumes and a simple set. It doesn't insult your intelligence with anything like a story or plot, and the second half is a bit like watching ice dance championships in a warm room with better music and no commentary or waiting around for points.

It started very well with a funny scene of a domino effect from a flying heel that any London dancer could instantly relate to (I half-wish that what happened, would really happen here, but I don't think there's room). And the first half reminded me that tango, like other forms of dance, really can express other things besides itself, like character, story, and so on. I'm not saying it always succeeded in doing that, but it certainly could and did sometimes. In the second half, the clock-hand legs, ice-dancing throws, and feet flickering on every note pleased the audience in general even if they soon lost my attention. Although I actually kind of liked the headbanging Britney Spears in half (the right-hand half, I think, I could be wrong) of a purple shellsuit, all very fragmented and Postmodern to Piazzolla's Zum. There was also Gallo Ciego, which somehow brought to mind the scene in So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish where they fly upwards out of her flat and astonish a lady in an aeroplane. I'm not sure why that in particular rather than some other random sex scene. But somehow.

By this point, I had noticed that on the platform at the back of the stage were four guys playing great music, so I mostly just watched them. I couldn't see the pianist, but a bandoneón is fascinating to watch being played because of the peculiar way it has to breathe. I'm curious to see inside one. I also learned how some of the puzzling noises that turn up on tango recordings are made; apparently with a double bass, the bow, and a process I can only describe as slap-and-tickle. For some of the second half all the dancers went off and let the musicians do Piazzolla all by themselves; according to my programme the instrumental pieces were Otono Porteno, Fuga y Misterio, and Adiós Nonino. They were called Quatrotango. There was also a singer, Pablo Lago, who was sometimes on stage with the dancers and sometimes just with the band.

As for the dancers, I'm very happy to say that all the women in the cast had, as far as I could tell, eschewed The Plastic; and I think whoever chose them should get a round of applause just for that. Yanina Fajar, who was also the choreographer, is extremely watchable and held my eye all the time when she was on stage. As for the men, they were nice to watch, they reminded me of several people who were exactly the people you'd expect (minus twenty-five years in some cases) and they must have done a good job because generally speaking you mostly saw the women, which is how it should be if it's going to be recognisably tango.

Peacock Theatre, until 11th April. I bought my ticket at 7pm on the day, all prices were available.



[Edit - jazzed it up with some publicity stills from the website.]

The power of dance

Munster vs. All Blacks, 18th November 2008.

Munster's Kiwis: Doug Howlett (62 caps for NZ), Rua Tipoki, Lifeimi Mafi and Jeremy Manning. With: 26,000 screaming Irish rugby fans.
Followed by: The All Blacks.



Anyway, it's the Munster crowd and their collective sense of drama that make this electric. In some of the other videos on YouTube you can hear them more clearly shussshing each other so they can hear the All Blacks. [Edit - the video was deleted and it's very clear in the one I've replaced it with.] Limerick has what you need to know about the match. Unaccountably, he didn't mention this.

Although not exactly sung, I think we can call Ka Mate, Ka Mate a great piece of music. Occasionally the All Blacks use a different one, but I prefer this.

As far as I know, and surely some Kiwi will comment if I am wrong, "haka" is in general a poem composed for dancing, and also the performance as a whole. This particular poem refers to how the poet escapes danger with the help of the Hairy Man, to fight or make peace another day. As I understand it, it is technically a ceremonial haka meant to motivate and unify the team, rather than a war dance mainly directed at the opponent. Same as this. I've read both that "the Hairy Man" refers to a specific historical man who was very hairy, and that it refers metaphorically to a team or tribe as a unit, the hairs representing collective strength. Either seems plausible.

Jive at the 100 Club

I decided to have a change, learning to jive at the 100 club. There's a class, then dancing, with live music, every Monday. I wanted to try some jive and this was recommended by a friend, who went with me.

The Class: The class is advertised as Lindy Hop, but my friend reckoned it was technically jive. I'm not sure what the distinction is, maybe someone will comment and tell me. After some warmup exercises, it divided into two simultaneous classes in the same room, a beginners' class and an intermediate. I hadn't jived before so I took the beginners' class. It was straightforward and enjoyable, starting with a warmup, then some footwork, and some technical basics about how to make the connection. We did open and close manouvres and a simple spin, enough to get you quite a long way. There were some women over, but we changed partners constantly. I thought the content was well chosen and and the class was well managed and fun.

What it lacked was a clear, explicit statement of the basic idea of lead and follow. It did come up, but true beginners had to be alert to grasp what they should do with the information. On the other hand, it really doesn't matter as much as it does in tango, and it's also possible I missed it because my friend and I were a few minutes late and missed the start of the warmup.

Layout and atmosphere: It's a rather long, thin room, with the bar at the near end, the stage and DJ booth facing each other along two sides, and some seating at the far end. The walls are deep red and covered in framed pictures of acts; the DJ wore a hawaiian shirt and sideburns. There's also a blue plaque commemorating someone who made "happy music" there for thirty-five years. Seating is at either end on a reasonable number of plastic chairs, and a few tables. The floor is uneven, with irregularities and even small holes. Most people wear flattish dance shoes or character shoes; I had salsa shoes with a flared heel, which were fine. Don't wear your stilettos. The atmosphere was friendly and cheerful, ages from 20s to 60s represented. Quite a lot of people dress creatively for their favourite music.

Hospitality: Good. Free water from the bar, along with reasonably-priced non-alcoholic and alcoholic drinks. No food, but I think there may be a café upstairs and there are lots of places to eat nearby. I didn't see anywhere much to put your stuff, but I think there may have been a cloakroom behind the desk where you come in. My bag did fine under a chair. There is air conditioning, which works, but it still gets very hot in there. Doesn't matter as much as it does for tango, though. The loos were out of paper, but have one unusual feature: graffiti seems to be tolerated, and I read much about the activities, anatomies, finances and obsessions of the patrons of the 100 Club. It's like the walls of Pompeii in there. Also, there's a Dyson Airblade to dry your hands.

Anyone or anything interesting that turned up or happened: There's live music every Monday. Laura B and the Moonlighters were indisposed, and they were replaced by the Sentinels of Rhythm, who were good. Check the website for who's on when.

What I thought of the DJ'ing: Practically all of it, and the live music, made me feel happy and want to dance. Only one or two tracks, late on, were exceptions, and that was only because they were more challenging. There were dancers there who made the most of them. They played not only things you could jive or lindy-hop to, but also some blues-like stuff which my friend decided was really a rumba. Which is fine, since I'm used to him, and rumba seems very easy to follow.

Getting in: £10, varies. There is always live music on Mondays.

Getting there and getting home: it's five or six minutes walk from Oxford Circus. Walk towards Tottenham Court Road. The club is on the same side as Topshop, just after the Plaza shopping centre, and it's just a door. Google Maps has a picture of the entrance. It ends at midnight, so chances are you can still get a train home. If not, there are buses in all directions from around Oxford Circus.

The website: The 100 club's website is a professional-looking job — it's a famous venue — but not actually very good, and tends to send you in circles looking for the information you want, which sometimes isn't there. Directions are hidden under "contact us". The London Swing Dance Society, who give the classes, have more the kind of website we're used to - messy, but what you need is there somewhere. That link leads to the listing for Mondays.

How it went: I managed OK in the class, and then I danced with my friend, who leads well in a variety of dances. I don't respond well to instruction from strangers on the dancefloor, but I know him well enough that he could set me right when I was puzzled. After a few tracks and the crucial information that, if in doubt, I'm rocking back on six, it started to gel and I felt I could contribute. I'm pretty sure any tango dancer watching me would have been able to tell that I danced tango, because tango technique and ornaments quickly began to appear, but otherwise the music and a clear lead take care of the differences. I didn't dance with anyone else, in the end, but I had a really good evening and would be happy to go there again.

Dancing Hero Worker Statues

This is classified on YouTube as "Sport - extreme," but I think it's dance. I suppose it's possible that could be said of many body-building competitions. I also think it's amazing. (This is another one for you, MB).



And will somebody please remind me what this piece of music is? I don't think I've heard it recently, perhaps not since the fall of the Berlin Wall, but the tune is deeply familiar to me. It feels like the sort of thing Bestemianova and Bukin might have used in the eighties (remember them?). People in the YouTube comments say it's from a 1992 movie flop called "Conquest of Paradise", but my memory says that's nonsense, for ten-year-olds who've never heard music, like saying Vaughan Williams' Rhapsody on a Theme of Thomas Tallis is "from Master and Commander". It reminds me of part of Carmina Burana, but I don't think I've ever known its actual origin and I'm not even sure what language is being sung. It might be medieval vernacular Latin, like O Fortuna, or it might be almost anything.

And if anyone can read the Chinese characters, do translate.

Hat tip to Lory.

Torvill and Dean

Here are two videos from my childhood. I knew they were good - I watched on TV at the time. But I'd almost forgotten how good they were. I didn't understand what was good about it. I just knew that I couldn't speak or look away.

Here they are dancing to Barnum in 1983. Look at 01:05, and 01:15. The mimed clown costumes at 03:20. The mimed trombones at 03:40. Hear them?



And here it is - Bolero, 1984. The story enacted is about a pair of lovers who climb up the side of a volcano and throw themselves in. Notice the little dip at 01:45. Hear it?



There are no links. There was never any routine in any routine of theirs. And notice what happens to the commentary in both.

A problem with watching that last performance is that it makes it hard to watch anyone else dance anything at all to the same music. I get the same thing, listening to Plácido Domingo singing E lucevan le stelle - it seems so definitive, so fundamentally right and proper, that anyone else's recording sounds like Domingo without the Domingo. But that's how it goes.

Going to milongas, workshops, and whatnot, I see quite a lot of tango performances. And I do sometimes see dancing that's technically brilliant, and bores me stiff. It's not because it's 'show tango'. There's nothing wrong with show, and I like a good show as much as anyone. What makes any dance dull or exciting is not the style - it's the content, I think.

Drawing a tango picture - a sensor and computing project

Apropos of a post on Tango-L, it would be so beautiful if I could record the movements of my feet as little comet-trails of light on a video screen representing the floor.

Of course there would have to be a way of recording the music at the same time. It would be nice if the intensity of the trails could represent the degree of pressure, and their length could correspond in some way to the beat or the character of the music. But if these things were configurable by a human that would be fine, it needn't be entirely automatic.

As far as I could tell, the author of the Tango-L message had something much simpler in mind. [Edit: here's what he is working with.] But what would we need to achieve what I'm thinking of?

• Some kind of wireless motion detector that can go in the toes of my shoes without interfering with the dancing. It has to detect and transmit position as well as pressure. That might mean that there has to be something special about the floor - if so, it has to be danceable as well.
• The receiver.
• A computer to connect the receiver to, and some software to do the following:
• Record and plot the transmissions on a representation of the floor. It might work better if the computer were also playing the music and could process that stream at the same time. At least I think that's a possible solution.
• Output the results as a video file, with some configurable settings as how exactly the movement is represented. It might look a bit like 'visualisations' in music player software.

My guess is that the sensor part is probably the most difficult, but I'm not sure where the technology is right now. An important milestone, let's call it Phase I, would be to record the entire dance as a single static squiggle; from there, you add the dimensions of pressure and time. I can imagine that getting everything properly synchronised with the music might be tricky, too, but that would be less of a problem in, say, a university computing department than it is in my world.

Another thought: it would be best if the entire sole of the foot could be represented, with the heel seperate from the toe. They do different things. So maybe at least four sensors are required for each person. But not necessarily in Phase 1.

A project for someone's computing and interface course, I think (and Doug).

Phase 3 is commercialisation. Lots of DJs play their music from a computer. Wouldn't it be amusing, and perhaps lucrative for the DJ, if you could slip some little widget into your shoes, and buy and take home a file of your dance? Not like a video of yourself, but a video of your dance without you in it?

I can just see myself drawing little zigzags and heart shapes on the floor instead of those boring old circles. Wouldn't that video file make a nice present for your favourite partner?