My Dance Videos

All these videos you'll also find on YouTube and possibly some other video sharing sites.

Great Swing Moves of the World That Never Quite Caught On.

Recorded at the Herrang Dance Camp in 2004. Nikolas "Lloyd" Lloyd and MindI "Mindi" Lundqvist demonstrate some dance moves that sank, perhaps undeservedly, into obscurity in the swing era.
Camerawork, choice of music, and editing of the main sequence by Jan "Fish" Forsell.
Yes, I did get his permission to put this clip on YouTube.
Moves: twizzle jig, ankle-shaker, ape walk, golf swing, bunny hop, proposal.

Ska-Swing

In which our clod-hopping presenter demonstrates that Lindy hop skills can be used to dance to ska music, once one has mastered the art of putting the emphasis on the UP and not the DOWN.
Main piece of music used: "Riffin' with the Griffin" by the Jools Holland Orchestra.
I have been teaching skA dance (as opposed to this ska-swing fusion) at the Herrang dance camp for quite a few years now. Perhaps I should stop.

Five beat swing

A quick demonstration of some ways to use Lindy hop-like swing dance skills to dance to five-beat musical numbers, such as Dave Brubeck's "Take Five".
Cat Foley, president of the Newcastle University Swing Dance Society helps me demonstrate a few moves in a rather echoey room.

Defining Blues

The dance "blues" is notoriously difficult to define in a manner helpful to the uninitiated. This video seeks to arm blues dancers with a way of describing it to others.

Twin Shadow Dance

An artist called Edwin Li approached me about performing for a public festival in Newcastle. The full performance was about twenty-five minutes and here you see a condensed version. I and my partner Cat Foley danced in a very small space on concrete blocks in front of one half of a translucent screen that was divided into two down the centre. A light on us threw our shadow onto our half of the screen, and a camera on the other side of this recorded it and passed the image to a projector, which projected a reversed version of the shadow on the other half of the screen.

Unfortunately, a few things went wrong. The local public took delight in walking in front of the cameras and the lights, so the full performance is marred by numerous passers-by blocking out the images. Also, the recording of the information sent to the projector got mangled somehow. This video you see here I put together using editing software. I took usable bits of footage from one screen, and then flipped them round and put them on the other side. One advantage of this is that I was able to remove the central vertical divider, which means that the shadows can touch each other in the middle, and make interesting Rorschach patterns. The footage I had to work with was a shot taken from the same side that we were dancing on, though, so whenever we strayed across the central boundary, you can here see glimpses of our real selves.

I am dancing to some of my favourite swing music, which I chose for the occasion. Gene Harris (Captain Bill), Junior Mance (Blue Mance), Lincoln Centre Jazz Orchestra (C Jam Blues), Tommy Dorsey (Swinging on Nothing), Count Basie (Jeep Jockey Jump), and Casey MacGill and the Spirits of Rhythm (Rhythm).

I'm not entirely sure of the temperature, but I think it was about minus six centigrade.

The Flying Penguini

WARNING: no dancing.
This is not strictly a dance video, but is a vid of a performance at a dance camp cabaret, and that's my excuse for putting it here. A troop of small athletic penguins uses me as a platform for performing some daring acrobatics.

Newcastle Swing Dance Society 2010 performance

This was shot at the International Festival of Arts and Music. I'm quite proud of this troupe, not least because they were mostly beginners, and this was quite an ambitious routine for them. Only a few of them had been dancing for more than a year or two and half of them had only been dancing for a couple of months.

Herräng Shakespeare

Again, not strictly a dance video, but it is dance-related. An instructional video on how to fill a dance-floor by misquoting The Bard. CamerA and editing by Bobby Bonsey.

I am a Dance God

Oh dear - not really all that much actual dancing here, is there? This one is a poem about the frustrations of teaching dance.

Never Meet Your Heroines

Another dance-related poem, about a dance where it all went horribly wrong.

Jam circles kill the fun

In which I rant about how I wish people would stop forcing compulsory jam circles upon people who would otherwise be having a good time.

I hate the two-dance rule

A rant, in which I criticise one of the most dearly-held rules of dance etiquette amongst continentals.

Adding more romance to a dance

A speech during which I wear a fancy scarf and suggest that perhaps dancing up to a happy ending is better than dancing one long happy ending.