Swing lesson 13 | Brunswick

By the way, if you haven’t already read it, read this! – it’s personal, which means it’s rare! Go for it! Go! Now!

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(Monday nights at Bridie O’Rielly’s, Brunswick)

What an absolutely golden night!
It was first-time tripples for everyone who hadn’t done them elsewhere, but we started the lesson off with the electric-slide, a line-dancing set of phrases that has tripples in it. We had a blast with that for a while until people more or less got used to tripple-steps, then went into basic 6-beat tripples themselves. My brother likes to call the basic or on-the-spot phrase a vanilla, as it’s plain ;D so when we’re trying things for the first time in class, we tend to do a vanilla first, then a phrase, then another vanilla to get in the habit of keeping-on dancing after nailing a phrase.

Tonight we started from open-position and did a raised block-turn with leads haloing follows. As the follows came around we swapped hands to return to cross-hand position and went straight into the same right-side pass-by that Deej and I learnt at Werribee weeks ago. From there we did… American hops? Or American steps they were called? Sailor steps! Thank you anonymous noter! (Who the hell are you?) Basically instead of back-replacing (rock-step), we do a tripple to the right and a tripple to the left again, but the first step of each tripple goes behind the other foot and across, opening up on the second and third steps of the tripple. That was of-course four beats, then we did a four beat shuffle where we went back and forward twice, left foot first each time; (left back, right back – left forward, right forward, repeat).

The coolest part of the lesson was trying it at quite a very quick pace at the end, which I nailed every time! This was one of the fastest set of phrases I’ve ever done, but it was really easy and such a blast! This set of phrases was harder for those who weren’t used to tripples, but taking that into consideration, almost all of the follows did exceptionally well – to think so many of them had only just learnt tripples! There are one or two who can’t get it up to speed, but by no means does that mean they’re no good. With a little practice, they’ll be fine as they can nail it easily at moderate speeds. We have only one follow who has absolutely no sense of rhythm, timing or control – one of our younger girls; dancing with her can be a bit of a trial, but I use it just to excercise my own steps and pretty much ignore her frantic, nonsensical out of time shufflings.

Wednesday couldn’t come soon enough! I can’t believe I have to go a whole day without Swing!