Step Dance Saturday: The Warner Sisters & KIDS! (Video)

Hello and welcome to what will likely be a sporadic series called Step Dance Saturday! Our inaugural video is of one of my favorite step dancers, Melody Cameron, her sister, and a few of her sister's kids!  They live and dance on Cape Breton Island, which is part of Nova Scotia, Canada.

The dancing starts in the traditional way, with a Strathspey which transitions to a reel.  The Melody and her sister have choreographed their steps for this part.

When the two girls come on stage, they position themselves for the reel portion of the Scotch Four, a very old figure dance.  Both the figure and the step dancing itself originated in Scotland.  From this point in the video all the dancing is improvised, each dancer putting steps to the music as they wish.

As you watch, you can look for patterns of footwork performed on one side of the body and then repeated on the other side. It may take more than one viewing to be able to see those patterns.  If you want an added challenge, see if you can figure out the pathways the dancers are taking during the Scotch Four! 

Happy Dancing!

Friday Fun! Video of Some Awesome Dancing

Melody Cameron is one of my favorite dancers, and a former teacher of mine. She is from Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada and has her own particular, fluid, musical style of Cape Breton step dance.

Here she is improvising to a piece of 'mouth music' sung in Scots Gaelic by Joy Dunlop.

Enjoy!

Video: Two of My Favorite Dancers, Together!

Here are two of my favorite traditional percussive dancers. I love how they are each so tuned into and connected to the music, especially in improvisational settings like this one. 

In this video, Melody Cameron of Mabou, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada (all of that is important!) and Nic Gareiss of Michigan (and many place beyond that) are caught on tape having an impromptu, probably late-night, exchange/playtime/conversation.  They were at the 2010 North Atlantic Fiddle Convention in Aberdeen, Scotland this July.  Later in this video they are joined by two other Cape Breton step dancers Mats Melin and Brandi McCarthy.

Cape Breton step dance was the first percussive dance style I learned, and is still my first love.  A 'neat and tidy' and 'close to the floor' tradition where most dancing is improvised on the spot in response to the music, the aesthetic is to wear shoes that have some snap to them but not taps (which I learned the hard way, but that's another story!).  In this video Melody also throws some Appalachian style clogging steps into the mix. 

Nic was just a kid when I first met him more than a decade ago, but had already been dancing longer than me.  Always an inspiration, his blog Dance is Music is, I think, the best way to describe his dancing.