thethirdvoice and I went up to Cambridge over the weekend to spend it practicing with Molly for Towersey.There are some very nice ideas for the displays, but they did seem to be trying to make things overly complicated it places. One particular example was trying to do a circular zig-zag, which did feel like it should look impressive when dancing it, but actually didn't (think that's it's the straight lines that makes the zig-zag look good, so without them there was little point in doing it), was dropped for something simpler in the end though.
Learnt half the Oompa Loompa dance which was nice, but frustrating not to learn the rest of it, but then that wasn't what the weekend was about.
All in all it was a good weekend, but seemed to lack clear direction in places. There are lots of strong personalities in molly and I did get the feeling of "too many cooks" several times over the weekend. I think it just lacked having one person taking overall responsibility for it somehow.
So now I have the aches of having danced all weekend. Strangely however, it doesn't seem to be my legs that really ache more my shoulders... weird.
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I'm wondering if what you saw as a lack of clear direction was a direct result of the aim of getting more people involved in the teaching/leading of the sessions through the weekend. Remember, it's not so long ago that fears of dictatorial control brought us the teaching organiser whose responsibility did not actually include doing any teaching... ;-) I thought it was successful in terms of getting lots of people to run through different displays, and Gina/Emma/Alison/Naomi's planning worked well, and they are (I think) pleased that we got through everything (bar procession practice, unless I missed that). The changeovers were messy, sure, but that's inevitable with having substitutes and also trying to run teaching sessions in the other room.
It's more some of the ideas that were coming out at the weekend which were further complicating a variation (such as the circular zig-zag). Also I'm not convinced about the tumble in 12 Maggots. I like the idea of a molly tumble, but think there's enough to watch in Russell Wortley's without it and it would look better in something a little smaller. Personally, I think that's an idea to save for another dance at some point in the future, but that's just me.
The weekend work, the displays were well planned, it was just unclear who was running the practice at a few points.