On Saturday some dancing happened…lots of dancing happened in fact.

It was our first dance out of the season, held at the Weald and Downland Museum as part of their Easter events.

This was the event we have been practicing for the past few weeks, the one at which we were going to perform the Kings Men Story.

And perform it we did…and it was awesome!

We performed 3 sets in total, at 1pm, 2pm and 3pm, each lasting about 25 mins. The story set was the middle set.

We were slightly shorter of dancers than we often are on this dance out having 7 dancers and one dancer / musician who was called upon to be a musician a lot of the time as we had fewer musicians than normal too. This meant that all of us had to dance our socks off and we got very few dances off 😀 This, of course did not detract from the performance, everyone gave their all and the whole day was an amazing success!

I was originally down to dance all 6 of the story dances, but a last minute realisation allowed me to drop out of the last dance. That realisation being that we had 7 dancers in a 6 person dance…which would not have worked at all. I *could* have done the last dance, but I wasn’t sorry to drop out of it 😉

All in all it was a very enjoyable days dancing, and some amazing photographs were taken by Mr David Poole (husband of one of our dancers) and Miss Rachel Raee (a good friend of mine) which a am gratefully stealing borrowing to show you all our awesome dancing!

for the sake of completeness the dances I danced were:

1st Set:
Our Henry
Triskele
Witch Hunt
maiden Castle

2nd Set (Story)
Our Henry
Star of the County Down
Maiden Castle
Witch Hunt
Standing Stones

3rd Set (in coloured kit)
Summerland
Raggle Taggle Gypsy
Parma Ham
Fanny Frail
a brand new audience participation dance!

This (as the caption of the photo might give away) included a first for me… Summerland!

I have never danced this dance out, and very rarely danced it in practice, in fact I was convinced I didn’t know it…but it went perfectly so I guess I must do 😀

It also involved an audience participation dance…which involved, not only dancing with a member of the public…but  child!! Which caused much hilarity for those people who know me and my fear of children!

With this awesome day of dancing I can officially say that I am fit enough to dance in a mask!

Which is the whole point of this project 😀 63 days early too!

Never fear…I will not be stopping early 😀

Day 302 complete 😀

PS for more of Rachel’s photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/whackyrach/
and more of David’s: https://www.flickr.com/photos/54814827@N06/