venta

Well, after my spate of playing hooky to go to gigs last month, I'm back into the swing of weekly rapper practices again.

Rapper dances are put together by arranging self-contained figures. Some figures are traditional, some people have made up in the last few years. Many have euphonious names, sometimes more than one - you can often tell where someone learnt to dance from what they call the basic starting position (Front Guard/Coach and Horses/Fiddler).

We're putting together a new dance to enter in next year's DERT (Dancing England Rapper Tournament), since the competition format is no longer a dance-display-on-a-stage, but instead a series of informal performances in pubs. And we've been trying to re-invent some figures a little.

Almost all figures are common knowledge. Sometimes, though, when a team invents something new, they'll try and keep it secret to prevent others pinching it. Given that rapper is a very fast dance, usually involving five people doing different things, sussing out who actually goes where can be a non-trivial exercise. The trick is not to dance it too many times in front of the same people, of course. Sallyport, a Newcastle team, managed recently to keep a figure secret for some time, until their rivals (the Newcastle Kingsmen) figured it out for themselves and introduced it into their own dance.

Conversely, Black Swan (winners at DERT for the past two years) dance a lot of their own figures, and will teach them to anyone who will stand still long enough.

So, while I doubt we've constructed anything inspired enough to incite espionage, we have with luck managed to alter some existing figures enough to look interesting.

So, the skeleton of the dance so far goes:

Derty Princess [because we can't remember how to do Princess properly]
Derty Jumps [a variation on Double Jumps, because Double Jumps is very dull and goes on for ever]
Dambustersdam [like Dambusters, only more so]
Backlock [one of those things that looks stunning if you pull it off - but has a very high probability of going wrong. The jury's still out]
Millrace [what happens if lots of people do Windmill one after the other]

I'm still voting for adding Denver Glove in, if we can find the instructions...

Oh, and for people who've expressed an interest in such things: International Mabel Day, the annual rapper extravaganza organised by my team in Oxford, is on 7th December. Details later, when some lazy muppet updates Mabel's webpage.