Maaike Franco, Irish dancing teacher in Brugge, organised a three hour introductory workshop for people unfamiliar with Irish dancing during the celtic week-end in 't Folk Dranouter, 14-12-2003. Having her met before, while both of us were participating in Tony Nolan's September 2003 workshop in Brussels, Maaike (the first person on the left on the picture on the right) was afraid I wouldn't learn much. Well, that's not correct. Beginners' workshops are also interesting for more advanced dancers because they can then concentrate on important aspects such as feet-, knee- and body-position, equilibrium, or style, and try to get that correct while doing simple steps at slow speed. And after all, it's much more fun to do dancing in group than alone.
Soft shoe introduction
Maaike taught the Easy Reel as explained on Olive Hurley's instructional video.
It goes like this (for reels written in 4/4)
- starting position: right foot in front
- lead around (4 bars): do two 1-2-3's on each bar, starting with the right foot; ending position: right foot in front;
- side step (4 bars): hop on left foot while making a cut with the right leg and do sevens to the right for 1 bar, two 1-2-3's on the next bar, and then repeat the same sequence to the left, starting with a hop on the right foot while cutting left; ending position: left foot in front;
- first step (8 bars): do two 1-2-3's starting left, but instead of placing the tip of the foot down on beats one and three, place the heel and turn the tip of the foot outwards (1 bar). Then two normal 1-2-3's starting left (1 bar). Then a hop-cut and sevens to the right for 1 bar followed by two 1-2-3's for the 4th bar. This entire sequence is then repeated to the left.
- finish of with a lead around for 4 bars.
The dance has an additional two steps that were demonstrated, but not explained. That would have been too hard for an introductory class, and she did already a marvelous job in getting the first step right for everybody.
Here is the Cameronian reel (ra) played by Shanachie which has a good speed for a soft shoe reel.
Hard shoe introduction
Maaike started by explaining the basic treble movement, which is nicely demonstrated (ra video) on Olive Hurley's Step by Step II video.
Then she taught a nice little choreography of her own which goes like this:
- right treble hop back, left treble hop back, right front stamp, left front stamp, right front stamp, left front stamp (2 bars);
- repeat the previous, but starting left (2 bars).
- sevens to the right, right treble hop back, left treble hop back (2 bars);
- sevens to the left, left treble hop back, right treble hop right stamp in front (2 bars);
You can try it out on the same tune as the soft reel.
