Overheard on the Web Chris Ronald explores the burgeoning video resources for SCD on the Internet, and takes a careful look at stretching before dancing. Dance Videos What do you do to make sure you are familiar with the dances on a forthcoming dance programme? Attend classes? Study Minicribs? Download diagrams from the SCD database on the Strathspey server (my.strathspey.org/dd/index/) – shown below? Look at videos of the dances?
popular end of the repertoire, including almost complete video coverage of the dances on the RSCDS Core Repertoire lists. The Strathspey server is not the only place to look, either. One can also search YouTube or the Scottish Country Dancing Dictionary. A word of caution: While the videos can be very helpful in picturing how a dance goes, it should be kept in mind that they may not exactly follow the original instructions. Sometimes this is obvious (‘bloopers’ can be entertaining, too!) but even where the dancing is ‘demonstration quality’ such as in videos from the Newcastle Festival, instructions may have been misinterpreted or the choreographer may have indulged in artistic licence. In this regard, a good place to check the fine points of how an RSCDS dance goes is the Technique Panel section of the RSCDS website: rscds.org/help/technique-panel-dances.html Footnote: To help dancers find a video, the manager of the SCD Database encourages people who upload new videos to YouTube to register them also with the database, which saves his team from having to scour YouTube for the video. The main advantage of this is that the video is easily accessible from the database page of the actual dance rather than having to be haphazardly located via the YouTube search-by-video-title function. It is also possible to upload dance videos to the SCD Database directly, if people would rather not put their videos on YouTube.
Stretching: The Truth You probably do more than one of these, but ‘look at videos’ is more likely to be one of them than it was just a few years ago. When this column reported on YouTube four years ago, it was quite a new phenomenon, and there were not many dances to be found. Now, through the Strathspey server database, in August of this year you could access 926 videos covering 545 dances. Quite possibly there could be over 1,000 before the end of the year. This is a wonderful resource – especially helpful to dancers who are visual learners. These 545 dances cover much of the
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According to one subscriber, ‘Proper warmups and cool downs can go a long way towards lowering the risk of injury.’ However, another subscriber with knowledge of the subject noted that he had
Graphic by Sue Ronald never seen any proof. The only evidence he had seen in a ‘reputable journal’ was an Australian study with Army recruits that concluded, ‘Stretching during warm-up had no statistically significant effect on the risk of injury, either for soft-tissue problems or bony disorders.’ Another research finding was reported in the New York Times a few years ago, under the heading ‘Stretching: The Truth.’ See www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/sports/play magazine/112pewarm.html This research indicates that stretching before a workout is ‘not only a waste of time but actually bad for you.’ The article also mentions that ‘The right warm-up should do two things: loosen muscles and tendons to increase the range of motion of various joints, and literally warm up the body.’ One thing everyone seemed to agree on is the need to avoid ‘explosive’ movements before being well warmed up: ‘explosive’ would include ‘corner-partner’ in quick time, lots of pas-de-basque, and even quick-time circles. The article mentioned above suggested to one subscriber that ‘Doing a warm-up like Ann Dix does may be the best. She takes a simple round the room dance and says walk it once, do purposeful walking once, dance gently once and then dance normally the fourth time. It's more fun and probably more useful.’ Something for dancers and teachers to think about?
