This dance was originally written for a concert/dance with the Heartbeats upstairs at the Mercury Cafe circa 1990. I knew that this would be a crowded event with a lot of new dancers. So I wanted to have some easy dances with no promenading down the hall, and they needed to work well with old-timey tunes and relatively quick tempos. This is one of those dances. It’s a great dance for new dancers.
Every dance has a critical move. In this dance it’s the stars. The dancers have to travel all the way around in 8 counts, and everyone has to get back to their home spots. In the first star the ladies stop at their home spot while the gents keep moving right into the See-saw. And the reverse in the right hand stars. And the ladies need to travel across the set to swing the gent in his home spot (on the side of the set — if the gents move forward to meet the ladies, the swing will be out-of-position).
Turning the stars is way more important than the hand grip. I’ve seen way too many sets slowed down by the insistence of the experienced dancers on getting everyone into a wrist-lock star. Why has that become so important? With a group of new dancers, I usually tell them to just get the feet moving, and don’t worry about the hands — a pile of hands is OK. You have to convince the experienced dancers of this, too — that turning the star is way more important than getting the right grip on it.
You may download a copy of the dance notes.
