Elizabethan Dance with Jeremy West

What do a a group of 18 teenagers do on a Wednesday morning at this camp? They gather in a great open space, walled by huge windows which pour in the sunlight, and they learn four hundred year old dance moves. Jeremy West, a favorite teacher in this camp, and this session’s director of Henry VI, Part One, usually teaches stage combat, but session he teaches these campers dancing as well. The two disciplines have a great deal in common. Both consist of choreographed movement on stage following a series of set moves, and both require careful teamwork, but there the similarities end. 

Jeremy told the campers that he’d be teaching them a jig, and he asked if anyone knew anything about jigs. In Shakespeare we know of jigs as court dances, but also as the dance that actors would perform at the end of plays. Today they have rather different cultural place. Most of the campers mentioned them as “pub dances” or “sort of Irish-y.” Elise, one camper who Irish dances competitively, shared the names and types of all the jigs in contemporary Irish Dance, and (when we begged her) she demonstrated these dances as well.

Which brought us to learning our own Elizabethan dance from Jeremy. Listening to a Renaissance consort’s formal but upbeat music, we watched and learned from Jeremy’s easy grace and confidence. In this dance, and in many Elizabethan dances, the moves are not difficult; most of them are simply ordered steps, claps or holding one’s hands in a particular shape. But it’s not about the difficulty of a particular move -- It’s about style.  As Jeremy says, “It’s about having the chutzpah to say, ‘I look awesome when I do this move.’” So the campers practiced their moves. Some campers have extensive backgrounds in dance, and at first it was easy to pick out the trained dancers. They were the ones who held their backs straight and upright. They looked directly at their partners. They were specific in the details of each move, pointing their toes or aware of the shape of their hands. But as the workshop went on and everyone practiced more and switched partners again and again, the less experienced dancers learned from the more experienced ones. At one point Justin (a camper regularly teaching other campers to swing dance) danced with Liam, a camper with a casual careless physicality. As they danced, Justin took on some of Liam’s swagger and Liam became much more precise and clear in his movements, and they were both loving every bit of it. Everywhere you looked you could see campers helping each other, and by the end, the whole group moved in striking unison, and I couldn’t remember who had looked like experienced dancers and who didn’t. It was such a pleasure to watch.