6 July 2014 - Seven Champions' Day of Dance

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St. Helens
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It is always a pleasure to dance with Seven Champions so we were delighted to be invited to their Kent Day of Dance, which was held at the White Horse at Sandway.

As you might expect there was an interesting variety of sides in evidence. Apart from the hosts and us, there was

Of particular interest to me was Steam Punk who use many more modern pieces of music to dance to than most sides. Kettle Bridge of course only use pure ancient folk tunes steeped in history such as Lily The Pink, The Runaway Train, Nellie The Elephant and Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo.

When we arrived at the venue, there was a steady drizzle and this caused some anxiety about where we would be able to dance as clogs do not go well on wet surfaces. Thankfully, though, the weather improved and we were able to play a full part in the day's proceedings.

With so many sides in attendance, in order to prevent long gaps between each side's performances, initially two dancing sites were used, one each side of the pub. As each side finished a dance, it made its way to the other side to await the next slot. This arrangement worked very well and Kettle Bridge got through four dances before the lunch break, namely Prescot, Marston, Saint Helens and KBC Processional.

At lunchtime, there was ample opportunity to get fed and watered as the pub had laid on a barbecue and hog roast, and a Beer Festival was in full swing with a fine array of real ales.

For the post-lunch session, on the assumption that the dancers and musicians would welcome a greater rest between dances, we went down to using a single dance location with the usual round-robin arrangement.
Interesting fact: "Round Robin" is actually nothing to do with rotund, red-breasted birds but is reputed to be a corruption of the old French phrase "ruban rond" meaning "round ribbon". See Wikipedia for a more detailed explanation.

Changing the subject completely away from rotund, red-breasted birds, the Kettle Bridge dancers performed Annie's, Ealuscerwen and Shawforth in the afternoon shift. This brought a very pleasant day's dancing to an end and we must thank Seven Champions for organising it and inviting us and thank all the other sides for being such good company.


Just to finish on a silly note, I plugged in the name of all the sides at the event into an internet anagram maker. This produced some very strange phrases.

  • Maenads = Sad Name / Mad Sane
  • Boughton Monchelsea = Touchable Gnome Nosh / Elongate Bosom Hunch
  • Steam Punk Morris = Spunkier Marmots / Irate Monks' Rumps / Make Inmost Purrs / Run Amok, Pert Miss
  • Dead Horse Morris = Hairdresser Doom / Aided Horror Mess / Sheared Door Rims
  • Broom Dashers = Harder Bosoms / Has Sombreros / Her Brass Doom
  • Wicked Belly Morris = Silly Worm Bickered / Climbs Rewired Yolk / Bromide Wrecks Lily / Molly Web Cider Risk
  • Seven Champions = Chavs Open Mines / Means Oven Chips / Man Evinces Hops / Men's Spine Havoc (original word changed to "spine" to prevent any offence!)
  • And finally Kettle Bridge Clogs = Belted Stick Logger / Better Lick Doglegs / Old Girls Get Becket

It is interesting that Dead Horse Morris and Broom Dashers are nearly anagrams of each other – or is this deliberate?

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Kettle Bridge Clogs web site by Stephen Cordery is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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