Dancing

So it has been a mad week with no time to blog, partly due to the 'day job' but also because we are preparing for a trip to Germany, to play for four days of 15th & 16th century dancing, in a medieval dance hall in a medieval village. Should be lots of fun, but needed a lot of preparation, not least getting mouth muscles strengthened up to be able to play shawm all day and late into the night.

It seems like a good prompt to post some thoughts and experiences about playing for dance. It is one of our favourite things to do, and is a great way to get experience in performing: you are not the centre of attention but it is greatly appreciated; mistakes don't get much noticed, as long as you keep going. The latter is actually fairly true even in concert settings, so it is good practice to be in a situation where stopping is not really an option and thus learn to fake it when things go a bit wrong.

But it is one of the situations where 'modern' expectations can be quite adrift from what they would have been in period. Many, if not most, historic dance groups learn and rehearse (and often perform) to recorded music. As a consequence, they tend to take their cues from quite specific instrumentation or ornamentation on the particular recording they use, to the extent that they find it difficult to dance with any other arrangement - which basically means, any live music, which is unlikely to reproduce a recording exactly, even if it is the same musicians who made the recording.

Of course, dancers in period would have had the opposite experience, having to learn and perform the dance with whatever musicians were available, and therefore experiencing substantial variety at all stages of rehearsal. Indeed, the 15th century dance masters make a point of saying that a good dancer should practice with different instruments, and not only should they not get confused in their steps, but they should be able through their style to express the different character of the music produced, e.g., by lute vs. pipe and tabor.