Quote:
Originally Posted by Lynn  Begs the question - why? |
I think the band often considers that it is the focus, and it's the dancers who need to adapt (or not). Quite recently, I was roped in to help teach MJ to people who'd never done it before. The pretext was that they had this band that played once a month, and they thought it would be nice to have a dance lesson. Well, we told them about 20 times what the sensible tempo would be, and we brought a CD for when we actually taught the class (@120bpm or so). And the band started, announced "this will be a bit quicker than you've been practising to", and proceeded to play at around 180bpm. It went about as well as you'd expect.
I also was at a MJ dancer's birthday party where they'd hired a band and DJ. The floor was packed while the DJ was playing, and the band completely cleared it. Now you'd
think that under those circumstances, they'd look at what the DJ was playing, and choose stuff of a similar tempo. But no, they carried on at way over 180bpm to an empty floor. It was embarrassing, to be honest.