The Nelson Dance from Doug Plummer on Vimeo.
I shot this back in January with my little HG-10 camcorder. This was before I took the Platypus workshop, and before I had a clue about how to do video. I have only now acquired the skills to cut this into something like I imagined at the time.
A contra dance repeats the same figures (in this case, eight of them) over and over again. I kept the camera running for the duration of a single dance, and got 16 repetitions of the dance from various angles. I made subclips (128 of them) and labeled them by figure.
I cut the music to a 2 minute duration, and fudged the transitions between them. I had actually 3 different tunes in the medley I had to makes seams for. Harvey also increased the tempo about a third of the way through the dance as well.
A sharp observer will note that people change partners mid-figure with alarming frequency in the dance. Nothing is very in sequence.
The Nelson dance holds a mythic status in the contra dance world. The apocryphal story has it that people have been contra dancing in this town hall for 200 years. The fiddler is Harvey Tolman, who plays in a Cape Breton style, and who was a recipient of a New Hampshire Folk Heritage Award last year. The caller is Don Primrose, who calls with a classic yet inimitable New England cadence. I don't know who was on the piano that night.
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