Won't you buy a case of needles from Jack that's so poor?
Audience participation rapper 101:
Boojum has a repertoire of three rapper dances. One is a traditional dance from the village of High Spen, in Tyne & Wear. The other two are "evolved" dances, which means we made 'em up. They are imaginatively titled "The First Dance" and "The Second Dance".
The Second Dance was painstakingly constructed over a few years, and involves some quite unusual figures. The First Dance was hurriedly thrown together one afternoon in an overheated Sheffield basement, and could fairly be described as generic. It's made up of the figures everybody knows and thus bears more than a passing resemblance to a number of other teams' evolved dances. In particular, it finishes with Needles.
Needles is a popular finishing figure, because it gives the Tommy something to do. If you know where to look, there is a gap in the dance through which someone can walk. Here's our Tommy (whose name is actually Ian) demonstrating it in Ironbridge on Sunday:
We do Needles three times to finish. Ian walks through the first one; Ian and the spare dancer (there are six of us, and a rapper dance only needs five) walk through the second one arm in arm; Ian, the spare dancer and Trefor walk through the last. Trefor is the clogmaker who featured in the previous post, he's also our MC when we need one and emergency replacement Tommy.
It's also the spare dancer's job to scope out the audience, and see if there's anyone else we'd like to drag through. This could be someone who seems keen, someone who's been heckling, or someone who looks outlandish. The more outlandish the better, really.
When we were dancing in a very cramped pub in Whitby this year, Ian couldn't actually make his way round to the back of the set. However, the audience immediately behind us was composed of members of Stone Monkey - another team who use exactly the same trick (and have been doing so a damn sight longer than we have). "H'away," he shouted to them "someone bring themselves through Needles", which someone obligingly did.
A couple of years ago at Warwick festival, we did manage to get the whole of Boojum (seven of us plus two Tommies) through someone else's set. The gap is always there; so long as you have enough elbows you can barge pretty much anything through.
This weekend, someone took it to its logical extreme...
...conga!
If you ever get dragged out of a crowd and behind a rapper set, bear the following in mind:
1. It is possible.
2. It doesn' t hurt.
3. Go exactly when you're told: there is only one gap, and if you miss it points 1 and 2 do not apply.
Boojum has a repertoire of three rapper dances. One is a traditional dance from the village of High Spen, in Tyne & Wear. The other two are "evolved" dances, which means we made 'em up. They are imaginatively titled "The First Dance" and "The Second Dance".
The Second Dance was painstakingly constructed over a few years, and involves some quite unusual figures. The First Dance was hurriedly thrown together one afternoon in an overheated Sheffield basement, and could fairly be described as generic. It's made up of the figures everybody knows and thus bears more than a passing resemblance to a number of other teams' evolved dances. In particular, it finishes with Needles.
Needles is a popular finishing figure, because it gives the Tommy something to do. If you know where to look, there is a gap in the dance through which someone can walk. Here's our Tommy (whose name is actually Ian) demonstrating it in Ironbridge on Sunday:
We do Needles three times to finish. Ian walks through the first one; Ian and the spare dancer (there are six of us, and a rapper dance only needs five) walk through the second one arm in arm; Ian, the spare dancer and Trefor walk through the last. Trefor is the clogmaker who featured in the previous post, he's also our MC when we need one and emergency replacement Tommy.
It's also the spare dancer's job to scope out the audience, and see if there's anyone else we'd like to drag through. This could be someone who seems keen, someone who's been heckling, or someone who looks outlandish. The more outlandish the better, really.
When we were dancing in a very cramped pub in Whitby this year, Ian couldn't actually make his way round to the back of the set. However, the audience immediately behind us was composed of members of Stone Monkey - another team who use exactly the same trick (and have been doing so a damn sight longer than we have). "H'away," he shouted to them "someone bring themselves through Needles", which someone obligingly did.
A couple of years ago at Warwick festival, we did manage to get the whole of Boojum (seven of us plus two Tommies) through someone else's set. The gap is always there; so long as you have enough elbows you can barge pretty much anything through.
This weekend, someone took it to its logical extreme...
...conga!
If you ever get dragged out of a crowd and behind a rapper set, bear the following in mind:
1. It is possible.
2. It doesn' t hurt.
3. Go exactly when you're told: there is only one gap, and if you miss it points 1 and 2 do not apply.