London Barndance: June 2020 virtual dance

Salty Dog Rag

This couple dance used to be taught by Dee when John Chapman was calling for us.

Ali and Christina recorded the music for us and we put together a video to show how the dance goes: Learning Salty Dog Rag We asked people to video themselves dancing and send in a clip for everyone to see.

Here's the full music track, recorded 130 miles apart: Salty Dog played by Ali and Christina

In the video we were trying to match the instructions listed on Webfeet but there are many variations and you will find several videos online. Here are a couple of them, suggested by John Sweeney: Mountain Folk Festival, 1993 and San Antonio Folk Dance Festival 2008

Here's another variation with simplified footwork - try this if you get too tangled up on our version: Demonstration by Kevin Peterson and Viva Hargigg The comments say "not done correctly" but this is folk dancing - it changes to suit the people doing it!

The result: we got 15 video clips which we edited into a composite: Salty Dog Rag - danced at a distance

Dance Tracks

Ali, Christina, Gareth and Linda produced an amazing set of dance tracks for us, with Jenny stitching together video from each performer. Mark and Lynne wrote the dance Covid Contra and Mark called it to the Tam Lin track. The walk-through was done live and the call was recorded. Bob Morgan even produced a stop-motion Lego animation! Seth Tepfer joined us from Atlanta, and called two dances: we have video for Bouncing Off the Walls though on the day he called both live over recorded music.

Live Performance

We were a bit more ambitious this time, and included several live-performance segments. Some of these were live call over recordings, but Ali and Christina were able to play live by doing alternate repetitions of the dance. This took a bit of practice, as being 130 miles apart there was a bit of delay in the link between them!

For those interested in the technology, we used Jitsi Meet as the "stage circuit" and Rhod mixed the audio from that with his call before sending the result into the Zoom meeting.

Keep an eye on the London Barndance YouTube channel for more goodies.