| McKeag's Corner |
coming to an end for the summer break; our dancers need to remember to practice. Remember it’s not how much you practice but rather what you practice. Some dancers have poor turn out so they need to work on the basic exercises that help with that, yet others have wiggly arms or the nasty bobble head syndrome and for those they need to strengthen the stomach and upper body muscles. Still others have timing issues and for those I recommend breaking the steps down into sections and work on the parts that are causing them to go off time. Since the feis season is once again gearing up, you’ll no doubt be getting results sometimes with comments. We like comments! And I wish more adjudicators took a few seconds to put something down. Now don’t be alarmed if your dancer doesn’t have any comments written down or that you can’t understand what’s been written. They are often scribbled down in a form of short hand that needs to be de-coded, and we sometimes are at a loss ourselves as to the meaning of the comments. Some rather obvious ones are T- Out (toes out) M-lift (more lift) X-feet (cross feet) Arms (means you’re moving them) watch timing (means you’re off time). As some of the dancers will tell you, I’ve been on a clean up your arms, hands and upper body crusade since coming back from the All-Irelands. The reason is simple - the level of dancing that I saw overseas was fantastic. These kids flew to and fro all over the stage showing incredible control over their arms and upper body, which can only be obtained by hard work, and training. I think this needs to be started as soon as possible. Now that’s only a small part of Irish dancing but it’s pretty important. Keeping your body under control will not win you a medal, but not having body control will sure knock you out of the medals faster then you can do the 7’s. We’ve also introduced video into the class set up and I think that you will see more of it during the fall as we prepare teams for the Oireachtas. This allows the dancers to see what we see or in the case of hard-shoe solos, hear themselves going off time. We hope that by using it we can build on the success we have already enjoyed. Regards, Sean |
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