Part 4: Comments on bluesSHOUT! by Damon Stone. This event has been a long time in coming.
It mixes everything I've always enjoyed at other events into one great big ball of wax. It is also the
culmination of my vision to have the dances I watched my elders do, and later learned from them,
presented on an international level, given the respect of technique, culture, history and aesthetic
they deserve.
bluesSHOUT! isn't about "preserving" the dances of yesterday, nor is it about trying to create dances to replace those that developed with the creation of Blues music. It is about connecting with the culture of the Blues and becoming part of the living tradition.
It is a celebration of the music and culture that have given rise to the dances we do historically and contemporarily. It is community and family. A place were one-upmanship and sibling rivalries go hand in hand with praise and support. A reunion, so to speak... with Charlie Fuller acting the part of your drunk uncle.
Part 5: Comments on bluesSHOUT! by Charlie Fuller. BluesSHOUT! is a celebration, first and foremost, of the spirit that has brought hundreds of dancers to our town each year. It is a celebration of the history we have learned. It is the teachers who have taken our hips to uncharted territories, gotten our shoulders shimmying, and lifted our hands in praise. It is taking the flavors of what we have all learned and the ingredients of what we have taught and the spices of how we dance around the country and around the world and letting it combine into one huge pot of gumbo that simmers and stews and feeds all of us all weekend long.
BluesSHOUT! is evolution. It is the organizers, teachers, and dancers who have given the resurgence of Blues dance its direction, inspiration, and energy now adding another rhythm, another instrument to the mix, to allow the dancers to move a bit differently, to try something new, to reach out and stretch out and incorporate a bit more of the history and culture that is at the roots of the dance.
BluesSHOUT! is piling more thick chewy sweet backbeat goodness on top of everything that has gone before it. It is a place to build your knowledge and skill and be inspired until you are overflowing, and then it is a place that gives you an outlet for that inspiration so your spirit can infect others around you.
BluesSHOUT! is an acknowledgement of important parts of the history and culture of the music and the dance. It is a way of delivering that history to inspire as many people as possible. It is taking that history and internalizing it, and adding our own interpretations and burdens and joy and letting it all loose into the room and into the world. It is the cross-pollination that happens when so many brains let go and so many bodies become dancing bodies.
BluesSHOUT! is all of these things, and even though this is the first year, I already know what it is because the bits and pieces we spliced into last year’s Cheap Thrills proved to be beyond my wildest expectations of what could happen, what the participants were capable of, and what kind of energy resulted from even just a little peek at the SHOUT-ness of what bluesSHOUT! is.