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  Introducing the Pimpelmezen to Irish Dancing, 13/03/2004.
     
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The Pimpelmezen in the Celtic Towers Irish pub

The Pimpelmezen are a bunch of good friends united around pleasure and music. They organise annually an excursion combining culture and fun. This year, their goal was the city of Ghent, not really the place to look for Irish dancing, but impossible? Hell no ! The Irish pub Celtic Towers, in the heart of the historic centre, proved to be an ideal location to organise a small introductory workshop for 12 persons.

Let's see whether or not a Belgian is able to teach some Irish dancing to a mardi grass group from The Netherlands.



Here is what they found themselves into:

Pimpelmezen get beer Warming up: Guinness and Hoegaarden are good for this purpose, true, but of course, more is needed: mobilising ankles, knees and hips, stretching the calfs, getting good balance, practising the so difficult open position with feet crossed, etc...
Balance left and right Getting the rhythm: Irish dancing is not possible if you aren't able to recognise the 8-bar patterns in the majority of the tunes, and if you can't feel the beats and counter-beats. And then there are the different steps. Hence, a good exercise is to use the pattern // 1 - / 2 - / 1 2 / 3 - // to practice step down and kick your butt, side-balance (what is shown on the picture; not really an Irish step, but good for mobilising the hip), points, and point and cut. Also standing on the tip of your feet for 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 bars is a good exercise as well.
Ready for the Walls of Limerick The Walls of Limerick: After 1.5 hour, this group, which never had done Irish dancing before, was able to dance the Walls of Limerick. Click on the picture for a video demonstration (mpg; 11 Mb).
Luc dancing the Stack of Barley The Stack of Barley: This is a Ceili-hornpipe danced in couples. Steps and figures are explained here.
dancing a jig The jig: I was hesitating whether or not to teach the traditional 2-hand jig, but finally decided to do the bal folk jig. That one is easier and can be used for non-Irish jig-tunes too. For the differences, see this Dutch explanation.
Luc dancing a polka Polka: After nearly 3 hours of dancing, I briefly explained how to dance polka the Irish way, after having witnessed the "Dutch" approach. There wasn't anymore time to get into the details, but the message was clear: practising makes perfect. Here is a link to polka dancing.