Hyperreal

I’ve decided to keep all the negative stuff I want to say about Blackpool in a separate post to the main one… If you don’t want to hear me whinge you can skip this…

It’s not entirely negative though, I make some positive suggestions, and we all come out alive in the end.

Some of bad stuff was simply personal, but some might have affected others.

Although the whole event seemed very well planned, and run, I found that the organisers could have communicated things better to folks. Take Friday… No-where that I can find were we told when this was going to start. (I guess it might have said it on the ticket itself, but I didn’t get my ticket until I arrived.)

Likewise, for Saturday, I had no clear idea when or where the event was. (Again, might have been on the ticket, can’t remember…)

For the Sunday, there was the issue of the tea dance that became the ice-skating… I don’t think this was communicated well to us either. The skating was mentioned in an announcement from the stage early on on Saturday, but I’m not sure exactly what was being said, and a lot of people who arrived later will have missed it.

(The set-up of the sound system made it near impossible to hear what the compere was saying a lot of the time. This was very dependent on location. Straight in front of the stage the sound was OK, but at each end of the room there must have been echoes and such that made things a bit garbled. Interestingly, in the smaller ballroom next door that was used for practice, food, and the traders had the sound fed through from the main room and it was crystal clear.)

Getting info out to the punters could have been done better – the web site should have been updated daily in the run-up to the event with the latest news. The Ceroc Scotland forum could also have been used. Over the weekend there could have been notices put up about these details in the venues and the hotel.

Pretty much all the rest of my lows are personal, though a lot of people probably experienced similar… The bitter cold and travel delays were a notable feature of many people’s weekends. My journey home took more than twice as long as my journey there for instance. (Plus I’ve come down with a bad cold. )

The other big low was probably the result of an adrenalin surge when I was tired and hungry, and the inevitable results. The late-ish Friday night left me lacking sleep overnight, and with the “Take A Chance” contest up (pretty much) first, I didn’t manage to eat any lunch before going into it.

I thought I was fairly calm about the whole thing, but there’s always going to be a bit of nervousness to doing a competition. So I guess the adrenaline rush from that compensated for the lack of sleep and food, but as it wore off, I began to feel a bit yucky. I can tell you that then taking Pro-Plus to stave off the tiredness is exactly the wrong thing to do – or at least, it is for me! It made me feel even worse, and made it difficult for me to eat the meal I knew I needed. Fortunately once I had eaten and allowed myself a wee rest, I felt a lot better.

At 7pm I just wanted to go home. At midnight I wanted the night to go on for another 3-4 hours.

Next annoyance… The filming thing. They make it clear – no videos, and I understand why. They say they are going to police this fairly strictly. Sure, I can understand that too. But I still didn’t like getting hassled three times for taking normal photos with my camera. (Plus one of the crew members seemingly deliberately standing in front of me to obscure my view of the dancers when taking photos of friends.)

If I were going to try and go against their rules about no videoing, first I’d use a video camera (and my video camera is also a better regular camera than the digital camera I chose to use because it doesn’t look like a video camera, and so – I thought – would mean I got hassled less) and secondly, I wouldn’t do it right beside the professional camera guy and judges, in full view of the world.

The way things are going though, in a few years’ time most camera phones will be capable of recording a video of folks dancing well enough. Then to sell the DVD it’ll need something else, maybe more angles – one camera per dancer? Or just a cheaper price?

The only other negative thing was with some of the dancers I met or saw. This was the first time I’ve ever been dancing “south of the border” – i.e., in England. There was a recent thread on the forum about the difference between circling, bouncy dancers, and smooth, slotted ones. In Scotland, amongst the ladies I’ve danced with, there might be an equal number of circling to slotted followers. The best followers will follow their lead, so as my style is fairly slotted, that will probably explain why I seem to dance with more slotted dancers than circling.

But I can only think of one, maybe two, followers whom I’ve danced with in Scotland, who have very bouncy hands when I’m leading them, and they’re very bouncy people anyway…

In Blackpool, I came across some surprisingly bouncy followers and when I occasionally took time to watch the regular dancers (not the competitors) I noticed a lot of very bouncy leads. Can’t say there was much difference in slotted vs circling from what I’m used to, though the balance over the weekend was probably more towards the circling follower, rather than slotted.

So, strange as it may sound, there does seem to be a noticeable difference between the styles of the average English and Scottish dancer, though not a big one. There was maybe only one girl I danced with was so bouncy that I would choose not to ask her to dance again because of it.

Oh, last wee rant before we get on to the good stuff – promise! This could be another North/South divide thing… On the forum there are some folks who like to complain about the music at the typical Ceroc night – something I’ve rarely had a big problem with… I don’t know if the music on Saturday night was typical of anywhere or anyone in particular (I’m not really sure who was DJing over the night) but a lot of the time, the music left me rather uninspired.

During the day there was a lot of good music – some nice “poppy” dance-y stuff, but good music that you would want to dance to (or at least I would…) There was a fair mix of stuff though…

During the evening I sometimes thought I’d never hear a tune I’d want to listen and dance to. I’m happy if I like 50% of the music on a night, but on Saturday I probably only liked about a fifth to a quarter of the music. In particular, I thought there was too much fast swing.

I though one of the big things about Modern Jive was that it was good for modern music. So why so much music that wouldn’t have been out of place 50 years ago? And if I especially wanted to dance to swing, I’d have learnt a swing dance.

I liked the sets by Dance Demon and (especially) Ceroc Jock on the Friday night, and would suggest that they could be tried out on the Saturday night next year.

Ok, rant over. Sorry for taking your time… If you haven’t already, please follow the link below to the rest of my write-up about Blackpool.

Cheers!