Shaking It Off at the Fete

The Tap-Kids were rockstars again at the local fete this year.  We've performed there so often now that we have it down to a fine art - both in terms of the performances and in terms of the technical stuff like setting up and striking the tap boards.  One of the guys running the stage this year remarked on our speed - he'd been all prepared to help, then he'd left the area to check on something and came back to find it all set up.  Another fete-volunteer-guy was helping Fixit lug boards into the grounds, and as they shook each others' hands said Oh so you're Mister Caroline? The kids found that terribly funny.



As usual, for the performance run order, we worked from youngest to oldest.  Here's a picture of the Tiny Tappers, who are aged 3-4, being delightful tapping bumblebees. One of my newer students, who'd been with me less than a term and had never seen us perform, was suddenly stricken by massive stage-fright and sat on her mum's lap looking at me with big tears rolling down her little face.  But I offered to hold her hand for the performance, and also said she could dance holding her special lion soft toy, and she bravely agreed to come on.

 

Of course once we started she was fine and had a splendid time.  The kids indulged me by dressing up for the show, and I think they look so adorable with their wings and face-paint and antennas. Such cuteness.


Trombone playing bumblebees. Edible.

The next to perform were the Flappers Class, who are beginner-level tappers of school age. They did a terrific job walking 500 miles.



 (It's a song, they didn't really walk that far.  But there was walking of sorts. And jumping.)



I especially like the bit where they fell down at your door.



We had the Gliders1 Class (more than beginners) up next, so many of them that it was hard to get them in one photo. 



They had a pretty tricky routine this year.  With shoulder choreography and everything.



This is them just before they bite the dust. Look at their faces, they can't wait to pretend to die.



Then came the Gliders2 class. They were performing Lollipop and at the final class before the fete  I suddenly decided to make them do the routine with lollipop props.

 

One of the young tappers was a bit concerned that this was too much to expect of them at the last moment, and to be fair, he had a point. It was a big ask.

 

But of course, these kids are so good that they absolutely coped and remembered the new lollipop holding (and licking) choreography. Such troopers. (Should that be troupers?)



After that it was time for the Grand Finale, the ambitious routine where I put all my senior classes together in one dance, doing different things to each other.  We had one fun rehearsal on the Friday night before the fete so they could get used to tapping with all the three classes together. It went incredibly smoothly! They all loved doing this song, and were just fantastic about knowing where they had to be and what they had to do.  I was so impressed with them.



I think they were all bursting with excitement to get up there and perform. First to take the spotlight were the youngest of the three senior classes, The Shufflers.



Falling Off The Log step. We worked VERY hard on this. (I was a little bit sick of this step by the end of term, I taught it to some grown-ups as well so I had to fall off the log a LOT.)



 What a team.

 

Next up were The Tapsters.  This used to be Climber's class but he no longer wants to tap. So sad. Lucky I still have all these gorgeous girls to work with, because this class is the most advanced and are up for all the challenges I can throw at them. So clever.  I still put Climber to work; you can see him in the background being the stop/go person on the ipod, so that I could have Nell on photographic duty (didn't she do an excellent job?) and Fixit on videoing-using-the-ipad duty.  He also did a good job, except there was an ipad malfunction right when this routine (the one I really wanted recorded) started, and he didn't get any of it.  However I was able to get footage from Julie, and Jen (who had a child in each of the three classes), thank you laydeez, and put together a video, see below.



I wasn't planning to dance in this routine at all, but one of the Tapsters was away this weekend, so I took her place.  It was fun!

 

Wings!



Then the groovy Groovers came forward and performed their stuff with their usual aplomb.



They love this move.  We call it The Geronimo. All the other classes are jealous and want it in their dances as well.



The crowd was very impressed with it too.



For the final chorus, we had pat-a-cake, balancing and bridges.  When we finished we received an enormous round of applause, and lots of cheering. 



Great work, kidtappers! Once more you did a fantastic job entertaining the crowd.  So proud of you all.  Big thanks also to Fixit, Nell and Climber, and of course, to all the wonderful tap families.

The Grown-Ups' Christmas Concert 2014

I felt a bit sorry for my Grown-Up students at the end of last year, in the lead-up to their Not Really A Concert. They were all convinced they were terrible and would mess up.  Every single one of them.  You would think that this meant they had a mean teacher who stood out the front frowning and yelling, but I assure you this is not the case!  I encouraged them, promised to do their dances with them on the night where necessary, praised them, and gave them plenty of revision, notes and videos to help get them ready.  Yet still they fretted. This is normal, they're like that every year.  They're not used to being showponies, and they always freak out beforehand and then they always have a good time during and afterwards.


 
The reason I was sorry for them was guilt, a conviction that the stress I was feeling trying to get 8 adult and 15 kid tap routines into 2 shows involving 60 odd performers within 4 days of each other was causing me to be less calm and zen in the face of their pre-show nerves. Immediately the kids' performance was over I was aware that a massive burden had been lifted from my shoulders and I was able to front up to all my adults' classes in their final week in a relaxed state of mind and try to put their fears into context.



What is the worst thing that will happen if you make a mistake? I said to them.  Nobody will die. Most of your audience won't even realise. Nobody will demand their money back, because we're not charging people money to watch this! So just enjoy yourselves. You know these dances. You know it'll be fun on the night.  And afterwards you can have a laugh and a drink.  You will be fine, I know it.



And they were.  They were all great. Yes, mistakes were made (including several from me) but the audience enthusiastically appreciated every single routine.  And that's the pay-off, that's why my students put themselves through it every year.  They're not professional dancers, they are just people who wanted to learn a new skill. They've learned something hard, something out of their personal comfort zones, they stood up in the face of their nerves and gave it a shot, and the reward? Applause, cheers, whistles, whoops and smiles.  Well-earned and very, very gratifying.



At the end of the night all the students, including some of the tap family kids, got up to join in the group Shim-Sham.






Then we took a bow, cracked the champagne and toasted a great night, and a great year, of tap. 


Flowers after the show


Students and party food.


The Advanced Class posing ala Mambo #5 (Five fingers held up, get it?)


Last ones left at the end of the night.



I have such lovely students, and I love my job.

Link to video... (Some music has been changed, owing to YouTube rights restrictions)

International Tap Dance Day 2014

On May 25th we celebrate the birthday of Bill Bojangles Robinson and International Tap Dance Day. This year I decided to put together a little video to mark the occasion.  It was so much fun to make. 

I only have moderate iMovie editing skills, and an awful lot of my students were absent this week *curse you late Autumn Flu/Cold mini-epidemic* but I am pretty happy with the result.

 Hooray for tap dancing. It is the best!

Twist of Fete

We were, once again, an absolute smash hit at the Merri Creek Fete last weekend.  So many great comments about how good the kids were, and a smiling and appreciative (and huge) crowd to cheer them on.  We had a great time, and I was super proud of them all.  My sister came along and took some gorgeous shots for me.

We tend to perform from youngest to oldest so you can see the development.  This is the Flappers class, for beginners and preppies.  They are a very capable crew this lot.

 

I thought they did a great job. They had to master some tricky stuff but they made it look easy.

 

The next two classes are younger More Than Beginners, and I now have so many of them we've had to split across 2 classes.  These are the Gliders1 Crew.
 


They always bring me sunshine.



And here are the Gliders2



They make me happy.



The Shufflers are intermediates.  I love the application and dedication in this group. They really want to learn tap, and quite often I see kids from this class watching other classes to learn extra routines.



They had a fun and fast routine and they just seized it with gusto.  A couple of these girls will be my junior teachers in a few years time, for sure!



The irrepressible Groovers.  Junior advanced. Always fun, with that touch of Broadway in their souls. I could teach these guys all day. They're delightful.



Their performance was rather ritzy, and had quite a few performance elements that they worked very hard to achieve, like formation changes and different parts for different groups.



Tapsters.  The Big End of school, the advanced class, the seniors.  They got a huge cheer at the end of their routine, because the tapping was so full on in it.

And they had a surprise prop! Here they are throwing money around, although apparently Climber just couldn't get his out of his pockets in time. His face isn't giving it away though.

Take a bow, you gorgeous kids!

The Doctor is [IN]

As I mentioned in my last post, a parent whose child was about to participate in their first ever Kidtap Concert was asking me what to expect, and I, downplaying it as usual, told her it would all be very low-key.  Striving to understand what I meant by that (who ever heard of a low-key dance concert?) she asked me if there would be a storyline.  I told her she wasn't thinking low-key enough; but part of my brain thought Could there be a story? Why couldn't there be a story? I could make a story. And the idea wouldn't go away. I kept thinking about it, mostly while I was in the shower.  The problem was the unlikely group of songs I was using for the show. They'd been chosen for reasons of dance-ability rather than curated to fit around a theme and at face value had little in common with each other.

At first I thought it's impossible, these songs can never be linked by a common thread. I thought that for a week, but however often I thought that I never let go of doing a story. Eventually, by dint of persistence, more long showers and the knowledge that the linking story could be as flimsy as all get-out if it had a skerrick of sense behind it, an idea that had possibilities presented itself. What if the common theme was advice, what if we set the whole thing in a counsellor's office, and the songs were all answers to problems? Further inspiration came from watching a Doctor Who special of Never Mind The Buzzcocks (on Youtube) where David Tennant suddenly started feeding Catherine Tate "Doctor, Doctor" jokes.

So with a plan in mind, I pitched it to the older kids to see if they'd be interested in being the actors, (umm, YES!!!) and started to fine tune the ideas.  And with a deadline looming, I put myself on lockdown and wrote a script, with the aid of a corny joke book.  The kids and I got together for one crazy, chaotic and creative afternoon a mere 6 days before the concert, where I handed out scripts and roles, gave them some directions and then told them to go home and LEARN THEIR LINES!!  Which they did, bless their cotton showpony socks.  What I loved was how willing they were to run with it, to hit all the jokes and to make a show. Let's put on a show!!! It was truly delicious. No wonder I love my job.

So with dances and lines learnt, lists ticked off and stuff carted over to the local primary school hall, the day of the concert dawned, and it was time to find out if I'd over-reached myself.

This was our opening scene, a waiting room of a doctor's office.



There was some fine ensemble comedic acting, (this scene was a lot of fun to put together) and then they did their seated tap-dance a'capella.  We were up and running!



The second scene was based on a kid (my Climber) seeking help because he was sick of his mother always bossing him around.  We played this for extra laughs by having him direct an accusing look at me over on the sidelines. The doctor's advice? Always do what your mother says, because your Mother is Always Right.  (Cue Climber demanding his money back.) If you need proof of that, just listen to the story of the Three Little Fishies (It's the one where they swam and they swam - against the mother fishie's advice - right out to sea, met a shark and hurriedly came home again).  Look at the adorable Little Fishies, just look at them.



Next we had a patient who wanted to make friends but suffered from shyness. Her doctor suggested she use corny chat-up lines as a solution, (more research required here, it was slightly difficult to find lines with a G-rating but I managed three), and voila, we introduced Jeepers Creepers Where'd You Get Those Peepers? We had a slight glitch with this routine, somehow the kids lined up in a different order than usual and I only noticed this after the song had started. Luckily we hadn't gone too far so I was able to signal Nell to cut the music, rearrange the children and start again.  It was very sweet actually.



The next patient needed help with exhaustion caused by over-scheduling; ie an abundance of extra-curricular activities (basketball, gymnastics, music lessons and *heavy eye roll* dance classes).  So the doctor sent her on holiday, a Swingin' Safari to be precise.  Don't forget your binoculars!



The fifth routine was trickier to thread into the narrative, being as it was a song from a Disney movie about two humans turned into frogs by an evil witchdoctor who were lost in a bayou with a trumpet-playing crocodile, singing about what they'd do when they were human. It only makes sense within its own movie, but it's such a good song to dance to! So the sketch consisted almost entirely of Doctor Doctor jokes until at the end the patient explained the above situation to the doctor, who told her the answer would almost certainly involve kissing (I'm not kissing anyone!), and the dancing started.



Cherub's class were next on, and their song was the hardest to fit in with the theme.  To what childhood problem could My Baby Just Cares For Me be the answer? Don't tell me if you think of something, it's too late now. In the end I gave the patient a non-specific illness. There was something wrong with her but she didn't know what, so the doctor prescribed tap-dancing to Nina Simone as a proven cure-all.  Frankly I'm surprised more doctors don't suggest this. The Groover class once more made excellent use of tap-plates on their hands as well as their feet. (Copyright Miss Caroline 2013)



Here is a picture that shows you the set-up of the stage.  The Consulting Room was off to one side so the dancers could be set on stage in readiness for the music to start.  It was wonderful how well this worked, thanks in large part to Nell wrangling them side of stage (Shufflers on, keep left, Gliders off, keep right etc).  I stood on another little board on the left hand side of stage for tap-dancing / keeping the beat help, and found to my pleasure that I was barely needed for the senior classes' routines. So relaxing! In this scene below, Cherub is playing a laconic dude who is sick of grown-ups asking him what he wants to be when he grows up, so the Doctor's advice was for him to tell the Grown-ups It Ain't What You Do, It's The Way That You Do It. We filled it full of like-speak (LOL, like, totally, like, awesome) for extra gags. 



I was very,very proud of this routine and proud of the kids performing in it. Stars.



We had a little break from dancing while I made a speech, thanking [almost] everyone. Tragically I forgot to thank my dear friend Jenny for her help, particularly for making the gorgeous Doctor Is [IN] booth but she insisted later that she prefers not to be put to the blush in public.  And then it was time for the combined Christmas routines.  The clever Tapsters and Groovers were highly professional with their song (Cool Yule), maintaining their different parts when necessary. They looked very slick.



And then came Here Comes Santa Claus featuring all 4 junior classes on stage, each group doing a class solo plus some all-together-now choreography. I'm surprised my brain didn't explode putting this one together, but it did actually come off quite nicely, considering their first go of doing it with all the other groups had been earlier that morning.  The video footage will show me bolting across the front of stage to physically collect the Tiny Tappers for their cue, as standing on the opposite side of stage beckoning and calling them was completely ineffective. Bless them.



So there you have it. Tapping and a storyline. Not so low-key as all that then. People kept coming up to me afterwards telling me what a good show it was. It felt like a triumph. I was so, so proud of those kids.  My goodness, what a lot of gorgeous right there.



I really, really do love my job.

(Adults Concert tomorrow night! Then I'm starting my Christmas preparations. Eek!)