Ship-shape and Bristol-fashion

[venta]

So, yes. Last weekend was DERT, and I took myself of to Bristol to compete, drink beer and catch up with friends. Disappointingly, by the time I arrived at the main venue some other blighters had drunk all the beer, but I managed to do some catching up.

The competition format, since 2003, has been that of a pub crawl. It's a whole lot more fun, and less stressful, than the old-fashioned one-dance-in-front-of-a-panel-of-judges contests used to be.

In recent years, the "spotlight" competition has been added, which is judged on one dance in a more formal environment. However, it just slots into the day like another pub. This year, our spotlight dance was our first dance, on a hilarious bouncy, bendy temporary wood floor laid on uneven flags. With that out of the way, we commenced walking back and forth across Bristol.

The Beer Emporium: an underground vault, whose curved ceiling and odd lighting had me disorientated and bumping into my team mates all the way through.

The Big Chill: timetabling meant almost everyone cleared out just before we danced. Those remaining stood unsportingly far back, or busied themselves taking pictures instead of clapping and cheering wildly. We stuck around to cheer for them: they may have been direct competition, but they're also friends.

The Gryphon: very empty pub, and we did a poor dance. rapperaddict and I both spontaneously made the same really weird mistake (despite her attempts to take all the blame herself). Let us not speak of it.

The Shakespeare Tavern: a packed crowd, led by Nigel and Rae, cheered us on to what I thought was our best dance of the day (despite featuring what would become known as The Rubber Hand Incident, of which more later).

The Bank Tavern: an all-right dance, in another busy pub, mostly memorable for having to repeatedly avoid MikeA's legs, which he'd stretched out comfortably while he sat and watched.

Needless to say, when the scores were finally revealed they bore virtually no resemblance to my assessment of how well we'd danced in each pub.

We weren't placed this year: not a surprise given the standard in the Championship league. Several of the premier teams had fielded "B" sides and cluttered up our league with them. When, late on Saturday night, full rankings came out we found ourselves fourth, which I was pretty happy with.

Saturday night did feature the now-obligatory announcement that the scores had been messed up ("we've made a glorious fuck-up", as one of the organisers put it). One league had been won by a team that wasn't even in that league - it remains a mystery that no one noticed this at the time of presentation :-)

A moderately common joke in rapper is for the Tommy (ie the ridiculously-dressed character responsible for occasional comedy interludes, distractions when necessary, and general audience-wrangling) to wait for a particularly frenzied bit of the dance, and then chuck a false hand out through the swords. Hey look, audience, one of the dancers has cut their hand off!

In The Nut, august organ of the rapper-dancing world, there has been much debate of late as to whether the rubber hand is actually funny, or just a hackneyed cliché which everyone should just stop right now. Popular opinion is divided. One of the problems is that we've all seen it a thousand times before; your average pub audience hasn't, and thus is entertained by it. Anyway, our Tommy likes to get her rubber hand out now and again.

Last time we danced at DERT she lobbed it rather inexactly through the set, and it landed neatly in the pint belonging to one of the judges. The pint rocked precariously, before stabilising. I believe we lost marks for our Tommy's ineptitude, but gained them all back in "buzz factor" because the audience thought it was hilarious. This year, she mentioned this to the assembled crowd before throwing the hand. There was a loud *thwap* noise as it landed - I had my back to her, so couldn't see where - but nobody screamed. OK, carry on.

It was later revealed that the hand had, in fact, smacked our lovely violinist (playing at DERT for the first time!) squarely in the face, then bounced off onto her fiddle. She never missed a beat. In fact, more than anything she seemed rather disappointed that no one had observed it.

A miscellaneous set of photos from the evening do.

Sheffield Steel's impressive double performance.

Crook Morris and their impressive double lock.

Black Swan, simultaneously the most exciting and the most scruffy team of the night.

Whip the Cat and their impressive Lego mascot (a reference to the official posters for the event).

Sallyport, and their impressive age range. Vince (dancing #1, right hand end) is recently retired. Dougie (dancing #3, centre) was at my 21st birthday party in a push chair!

Comments

[rapperaddict.livejournal.com]

I'm putting the Gryphon episode down to the fact that we both obviously decided we needed a drink mid-dance and tried to head to the bar before realising that we were still attached to 3 other people who hadn't had the same idea. Poor thinking on their part I've decided...