Skip to main content

Northern Climes: Northern Champs anticipated..



Northern Champs 2015

Cerco Addiction's Northern Champs - a midsummer party  and dance competition combined hit the ground running last year with a three day even that many regarded with great fondness and this years was event has been keenly anticipated.  It wasn't just the innovations and enthusiasm of the crew - it was in truth a different kind of championship.  A championship where sitting outside with an ice cream was to be enjoyed as much the intricacies of picking a winner in Lucky Dip. Relaxed, confident and still competitive.

So there was much expected of this year's event and it brought dancers from London, Scotland, Essex, Wales and the South West so the players are set for a good battle for medals.

It started this evening (as I write at 3am) with a superlative freestyle where Sheena Assiph provided a play list of the familiar and the extraordinary.  Ceroc Classics mixed with the most challenging tracks one might find.  All good fun - along with a testing line dance lesson from Julie Gunn (CMJ Australia).

The line up of dancers was rather special with new and promising dancers mixing with some very familiar faces.  Splitting them if they are all on top of their game will be hard.

New judges too - including Jen Hoy, Gary Stubbs and Lyndsey Bennett will need to bring their critical faculties to bear on a host of marvellous dancers.

So at 1am when we all said goodbye, it was for some a short break to be back in the hall at 9am: one can only admire the bottle of the Manchester crew who don't baulk at lost sleep.

The competition will be great tomorrow and you can still come along and buy a ticket on the door. I suspect it will be very well worth it.


S

27.6.2015

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Social Dance?

A weekend at Ceroc Southport reminds me that modern jive is a social dance...but only sometimes. This account of a Ceroc dance weekend will be my last as the waves of positivity and utter claptrap overwhelm me elsewhere in reviews on the internet and in social media. There were some very good bits to this weekender. I enjoyed it a great deal. Many of the songs in many of the sets in the Boudoir were very good, too few of the dancers did them justice, because there's the problem and here's my take on it. The trend toward slower, simplified music drags dancers down to a place where dancing is merely moving on the beat.  Some songs subsist on a diet lacking harmonic complexity, syncopation, melodic line over a dozen or so bars or intricate instrumentation.  This low calorie music is not the realm of the 20th Century minimalist composers like Adams and Reich, but a series of predictable notes which sound right even in the wrong order ( pace Morecambe and Wise).  Swi...

2017 begins - two weekenders

Southport: Swing It's rather sad to see how much of a blog post written 8 months ago still rings true after a weekend at the Fylde seaside in turbulent February weather and after a sunny sojourn to the Sussex border in March. I last wrote about Southport here (last June)  http://mindpokedance.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/summer-ceroc-southport-2016.html  about such matters as the Pontin's upkeep of the site which this time was I think worse for the winter lay off.  Some chalets were filthy.  The site was a bit of a wreck - in our block there was a cable partially rolled up at the bottom of the stairs! Sodden tissues of unknown origin scattered around the bins and bits of the shuttering on our block blew off during the stay.  By contrast the chalet at Camber was in better nick except for the much missed sofa bed which suffered from an unfortunate stuffing droop similar to the one the Scottish Rugby team exhibited on the Saturday afternoon.   This Southpo...

Réjouissance (or get your dance shoes love)

We might imagine all was well in the centre of Sheffield this Thursday.  A city centre funfair attracted lots of families to enjoy something akin to a seaside prom experience a mere 60 miles away from the chilly North Sea.  But there were three concerns behind this festive offering: the social, the economic and the public health and they illustrate the position in dance right now. There was a palpable sense of relief and joy for parents to get their kids some break from the reminders of isolation which has so badly effected so many lives.  There was some relief that punters were in the city centre spending money in the lucky business in the area.  The balance between health/wellbeing and illness were difficult still for some but for many straightforward.  It was sunny and hot, an outdoor event and health and safety measures were in place.  Of course I don't know how many chose to stay away or had to stay away.  How many, I wonder, still stayed indoors ...