I went folk dancing three times this week J. On Wednesday, I danced with the Melbourne Colonial Dancers http://www.melbournecolonialdancers.org.au/ at their weekly Wednesday night dance. I brought Claire along for her first night of dancing and I think she had a blast too!The group is mostly older folks but they are all great dancers. The dances are set for the whole evening and most evenings they dance to recordings. It is a lot more like the folk dances I have been to in Oregon than the contra dances in Charleston and other places. They do a wide variety of dances and a lot of choreographed partner dances. Once a month, the Melbourne Colonial Dance Band http://www.melbournecolonialdancers.org.au/band.html plays live for the dances. Next week is one of those nights and guess what? They asked me if I wanted to join in! Because the dances are set in advance, the music is also often picked out in advance so they gave me a copy of the set list and will bring extra copies of the music to the dance. It should be great fun!
On Saturday, I went to the Old-Time Tea Dance. There was an incredible live band with multiple accordion players, a pianist, a whistle player, and a banjo player. It sounds like they have been playing together for almost fifty years. Most of the dances are not called or walked through. However, they are usually done twice or three times in a row so if you don’t know the dance yet you can stumble through the first time and then actually dance it the second time.Here are the dances we danced:http://www.melbournecolonialdancers.org.au/TeaDance%20July%202010.jpg. About half-way through the evening, they stopped for a potluck dinner. It was awesome!
Tonight, I went to a Celtic set dance with some of the young people that I met at the Old-Time Tea Dance. It was so much fun! It is at an old Irish pub not too far from my apartment. We danced a whole bunch of quadrilles on just about the smallest dance floor I have ever danced on! There were usually two and a half sets (10 couples) on a floor about 15’ by 15’. Nice and crowded J. It really makes sense in that kind of space that couples take turns dancing in the square and that movements are a little more controlled. The dance teacher was such a hoot!She threatened to swat us with a broom if we skipped with our feet too much. I hope I get back there a couple of times throughout the semester.
After Conducting class on Thursday, I decided to go over to the new Melbourne Recital Center down the street from the music building to ask if they offer student rush tickets – they do. The concert that evening sounded very interesting and started in a little over an hour so I decided to stick around the area for a while. I headed over to Flinders Street Station to get my concession card since I was told by my student center at the Uni that that is where I should take the form and get my card. Well, it turns out that the form I was given was a bit out of date and did not have on there that they do not process the forms at Flinders Station between 4:30 and 6pm. Huh! After having a very confusing and frustrating conversation with the “customer service” counter, they finally relented and processed the form and gave me my card. I still had some time to kill before the concert so I wandered out of the station.
Outside there was an older man busking on the street corner. He was playing Meditation from Thais. They really appreciate music here. There are so many street musicians. I am actually considering applying for a busking permit – they are free to apply for and it might be nice to earn a couple of dollars now and then. I have also been watching a little bit of Australian TV.Their Dancing with the Stars has a whole orchestra that performs live on every show.
Anyway, I went back over to the Recital Center for a Vibraphone concert by Speak Percussion.It was so much fun! I am always so impressed by percussionists. Speak Percussion performed a lot of recently composed pieces including one premier performance. One of the pieces was for prepared vibraphone. The spinning valves had bits of cardboard and Styrofoam placed in and around them along with some of the metal plates and mallets hung by strings – not a great description, sorry, but it was a very interesting piece. There was another piece written for tuning forks and vibraphone. I don’t think I had witnessed tuning forks being used as an instrument before. They struck them with mallets and then waved them around in the air before setting them back down on the table. It was fun to watch. The last piece on the program was my favorite. It had five movements and was written for 4 musicians on one Vibraphone.Each movement had a very different flavor. One of the movements used bass bows instead of mallets and one was with fingers instead of mallets.
On Sunday, Alysha and I went to a Footy match (Australian Rules Football) at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. It was a lot of fun. I think this is a sport that I could actually handle watching.It is played in a round field, also the cricket field, with goals on two “ends” of the field. It reminds me of Frisbee, Quidditch, and American Football combined. There are a lot of players on each team and it is very unpredictable and fast paced like Frisbee. Goals are scored through three goals at either end – 6 points for the middle and 1 point for the side – kind of like Quidditch. Other than that, there is a good bit of tackling and there are four quarters to a game.The clock doesn’t stop all of the time like it does in American Football but I think there are a lot of similarities in the rules. The teams seem to be more community or city based and aren’t associated with a University. Players don’t seem to have huge salaries like professional football in the US so it has much more of a community feel to the sport.
No comments:
Post a Comment