Dance Lesson

In the box section after the soldiers have taken the boxes and we are left with the jackets, Simon wanted for us form a circle and begin to waltz with our empty jackets or with the ghosts of the men we once had. I think it's a beautiful idea and everyone else agrees. I think it pulls at the heartstrings a bit because these women have just received their husbands belongings and are grieving. Death is a hard thing to come to terms with and can take years to finish mourning. We have something that still has their smell and proof that they wore them, their jackets. They're roughly the size of our men and it's almost like they're there if we tried hard enough to picture them. In the 20s, waltzing was something couples would do or something you would do on a date and that's where the idea of waltzing in this section came from. We're all waltzing with these empty jackets then after we've done a full circle we come to a gradual stop and just hold the jackets, look up at Catherine who is still waltzing, drop the jackets and leave. We watch Catherine and are upset because her husband is alive and ours have died. We feel jealous and cheated but that is the point where it hits us that's they're not coming back.

To help us grasp the basics of waltzing, we had a teacher from the dance department come in for an hour and teach us how to waltz. I present you with a video that covers what we learnt:

Everyone worked this out in their own time and some of us understood it quicker than others. We started off by doing it in our own spaces then we moved into the circle formation that we would be doing it in the performance. Ah, that was painful. As we had all been doing it at our own paces some of us went straight into it and carried on swiftly whilst others stopped and started again. So we all started bumping into each other and got confused when we so much as looked at each other's feet. It was easier to understand if you had some background in dancing though because I do ballet and there are similar foot movements but I still got confused if I thought too much about what I was doing. This section will come together in it';s own time if we practise a little bit in our own time.