Blog: A Year in Village Hall
From the first Monday of lockdown 2020, Shaper/Caper found ourselves in quite the predicament. With schools, studios, theatres, even parks being given the metaphorical red card to the public, our living rooms were the only dance floor we could manage. What started off as a quick fix project to keep us content while producing content grew many arms, many legs and many other extra appendages to become what we now know as ‘Village Hall’ – our online dance class platform for adults and kids.
Week 1 Children’s Capers, March 2020: Pirates!
Episode 1 of our ‘Children’s Capers’ featured my one bedroom flat in Fife, some bunting hung round the door and one of the best opening lines in any online dance event:
“Urr we recordin’ aye???”
- Alex McCrossan, June 2020
Promo shot of our first “Snow Queen“ Children’s Capers episodes …
Enlisting the help of a partner to wave pool noodles at me from off screen as a kraken’s tentacles to evoke the feeling of dread comparable to any Hollywood film. Creating costumes from winter scarves, bed sheets and pyjamas, we worked our way through a smorgasboard of themed dance adventures. From 3 little pigs to 40s Hollywood; spies in space to snow queens; we had 100 episodes of these living room larks before we decided to take it to the next level.
Current promo for our digital interactive show for families “The Snow Queen” - inspired by our first week of Christmassy capers pictured above!
It’s now been just over year since we launched Children’s Capers, Couch Capers and Mindfulness as part of our ‘Village Hall’ portal in which we now have fancy pants microphones for sound quality, a camera that’s notjust my mum’s old iPhone, and so many green screens we’d give Michelle Visage hives!
Company workshop with sound technician Kyle Allan, 15.10.2021
We have all learned so much as part of our lockdown capers, far beyond what we each thought we’d be doing as part of a dance artist’s usual job description. Village Hall has been an immense collaboration across the whole team of Shaper/Caper, including previous staff and new members of the team who have just joined us. We loved the rough and ready comedic improv of our original living room based episodes, and now that we have been working on the technical difficulties (the many, various, countless technical difficulties!!) we hope that the future capers are even more fun filled and fabulous than ever before. For anyone who already loves to move their body, who used to love dance, yet to get into dance, don’t have the time to travel to classes, or who want to dance with the whole family – there are plenty of tickets available on the SS Shaper/Caper’ voyage to the Village Hall of Danceville, Dundee!
(That analogy works … right?)
Children’s Capers: Which Witch is Which?
Check out our Facebook and YouTube livestreams of Children’s Capers
And for more up to date, Hollywood-worthy (well … maybe!) Children’s Capers, head on over to Village Hall right here!