Well I've had a bit of a funny run. 2 weekends ago we went to a friend's wedding, which was a brilliant day. Unfortunately a large percentage of the guests ended up with food poisoning - us included! Not exactly what I was aiming for after but that's fine. I spent a chunk of the week off work, feeling rubbish.
On Saturday I had to head off for some TCRG training. So at 2.45am I got up and got moving so I could catch the first train out of Brighton at 3.40am! Keeping in mind that I'd only started to eat small amounts of solid food on Friday evening, you can imagine how utter rubbish I felt. Didn't matter, had TCRG training and I wasn't going to miss it! So 5 and a half hours later plus 4 train changes I arrived at my destination! So off we went to the hall and got started.
Although I felt pants I still managed to dance a bit (in between lying on the stage trying to cool off!). The day was incredibly useful, if for nothing else than to discover I was making the primary steps too complicated and Mary helpfully translated the rules a bit better so I now know what I should be trying to do! No full turns or twists etc, this now all made sense. I'm a bit annoyed I wasn't able to figure all this out before as I'd already had a few of my girls in competition and they were no doubt marked down as their reel steps had twist and turns and various other bits.
I should point out that I'm very new to teaching Irish Dancing. I was a dancer over a decade ago, so the dances I remember are intermediate level and I find it hard to strip the dances down enough, I worry that I've made them too simple. Anyway my girls are pleased to hear that I will be making these things easier, they've been shouting this for a while, however I just went with the fact that it takes a wee while to learn things.
Anyway discovering this was worth the trip all by itself. The céilí dances I've pretty much under control as I mostly teach these to the adults on Wednesdays. So I managed to stay on my feet until about 4ish and then we all went home, thankfully I'd a straight run home and was back in Brighton by 10pm.
I'm now looking forward to creating easier steps, I've also ordered the Blue Book for the céilí dances. One of my girls is also going to take her TCRG later this year with me so we've a bit of work ahead of us, but hopefully by the end of this year I'll have done the first 2 modules for TCRG and TRMF. Bring it on!
