KWDMS 2019

(As things quiet down very slightly for the summer, let's see if I can get back into the habit of posting.)

Last weekend was the Known World Dance and Music Symposium, a bi-annual event that's been running for a good long time now. It moves around the world (Carolingia hosted it something like 20 years ago); this year was in College Station, outside Houston. I wound up traveling with Thyra and Jesse -- they'd already been planning on attending, and I decided to tag along at nearly the last minute. I'm glad I did.

General summary: very good event, remarkably good given that they threw it together relatively quickly. I gather that the Anstreorrans had been planning on bidding for it next time around, but when the bid for this year fell apart due to logistical difficulties, they decided to assemble it with less than a year's notice. That's not a minor deal -- this is more con than event, and requires lining up a hotel, a deep staff, a Guest of Honor, and a rich class schedule. It was a great time, and the team deserve some serious kudos for it.

The GoH turned out to be a highlight of the event (and that may be the first time I've ever said that). Emily Winerock is not primarily a dance reconstructor; instead, her focus is on the role of dance in Renaissance theater and court spectacle. As a result, I learned a lot more from her than I usually do: this is a subfield that the SCA knows precious little about AFAIK, and we could stand to learn more.

Her current hobby-horse is a recently-discovered dancemaster's manual that, rather than being all about choreography in our usual sense, is about what I think of as small-scale marching band maneuvers: arrangements of dancers on the floor that spell out letters and figures and things like that. (I believe this is Footprints of the Dance in her bibliography.) Emily rarely has access to large numbers of experienced Renaissance dancers, so she had lots of fun asking us to try these figures out experimentally, seeing how we could dance from figure to figure.

I think she particularly enjoyed being able to put galliard music on, and having everybody just start galliarding through the figures. We even wound up with one place where we found ourselves with two spare measures, so (IIRC) Peter decided to spin in place, and I picked it up, and by the next run-through the entire set of twelve dancers were spontaneously spinning in more-or-less decent sync. It was delightful fun, and something that SCA theatrical productions definitely need to add as a tool for shows.

We sort of wound up adopting Emily for the duration of the event: we invited her along to dinner a couple of times, and drove her back to the airport at the end. She's lovely folks, and lives outside Pittsburgh, so I'm hoping the SCA dance community winds up hanging out with her more.

The event this year didn't wind up printing a Proceedings; instead, they opened up a Google Drive where participants could upload their papers. There's a ton of great stuff there: I recommend digging through it.

Some other highlights:

The first class I took, and arguably the most fun, was Jamie's "Contrapasso Da Farsi in Tutti I Modi" -- all six versions of Contrapasso crammed into one intense hour. It only worked if you knew at least one of them, but Contrapasso in Due is common enough at this point that everybody did. It was a wonderful illustration of how dance evolves, and provided lots of neat little variations to change things up. I'm planning on bringing this one to dance practice this fall, albeit spread over ten weeks instead of in one session. (His "Barriera Da Farsi in Molti Modi" -- all four Caroso Barriera variations -- was also a good deal of fun, although less well-suited to dance practice.)

Thyra ran a "Reconstruction Workshop" -- basically, a public version of an Accademia della Danza reconstruction session. She was worried about whether anybody would show up to a 9am Sunday class, but in fact we got about a dozen people, which is about the maximum the format can handle. The first hour was spent on Il Papa, the second on Gresley; as expected, we didn't generate any complete reconstructions in that time, but I think folks got a sense of how we do it. Hopefully some people will take the idea home.

All the King's Men: Emily had decided that, if she was in Texas, she should get barbeque; we all thought that was a lovely idea, and promised to stop on the way to dropping her at the airport. The place she had intended wasn't open on Sunday, so we wound up here instead. It was probably the most distinctively good meal I had down there: well-made meat, interesting sauces (the Savoury Espresso sauce was excellent), and fine sides. Worth a stop if you happen to be in the neighborhood.