The usual set of modifications and updates, plus the following additions and major changes:
Dancing With Confidence: Floor Craft For Progressive Dances, Milonga Etiquette.
Following: Follow Your Hand, Match The Pressure.
Spins, Pirouettes And Turns: Arms And Torsion.
Acrobatic Moves: Leans.
Footwork: Slides.
The usual set of modifications and updates, plus the following additions and major changes:
Dancing With Confidence: First Aid For Feet, Illnesses, Being Declined A Dance, Teaching During Class.
General Tips: Look Relaxed, Posture, When Things Go Wrong.
Leading: Finish The Follower's Lead First, Fingertip Leads.
Following: Placed Hands.
Spins, Pirouettes And Turns: Dancing A Turn As A Follower, Practising Turns, Dancing A Turn As A Leader, Cheating A Rotation, Generating Torsion (The Energy For Rotation).
Music And Musical Interpretation: Eight Beat Phrases, Thirty-two Beat Phrases.
Styling: Styling Arms.
Dance Styles: American Smooth, Bachata, Balboa.
Partially updated the Modern Jive, Salsa and Tango maps, etc. to use the latest Google Map API.
Updated the Tango Stretching Exercises link.
More venues added to the Modern Jive, Salsa and Tango maps, etc.
Modified the Modern Jive, Salsa and Tango maps, etc. to workaround a bug in Firefox 1.5.
More venues added to the Modern Jive, Salsa and Tango maps, etc.
Updated links to the Dance Crave website.
Started to organise the link pages into a variety of categories and sub-categories, etc.
New interactive maps added to the link pages: including a generic dance map, a map of Modern Jive events, a map of Salsa events, a map of Tango events to name but a few.
Minor updates to the Modern Jive Guide Modern Jive Guide, including: an attempt to characterise Modern Jive in the What Is Modern Jive? chapter. “What Is Modern Jive?” chapter, and a major reorganisation of the Dancing With Confidence chapter.
New links to moves at Pulse Jive, and updated links to moves and clips at Dance Yourself Dizzy.
Version 0.11, the “post-hard-drive-crash” release! New links to moves and clips at Le Roc Scotland and Dance Northwest, extra edits and refinements — including additional diagrams and some move corrections.
Site optimisation, for faster access (preloading) in the Firefox browser.
The usual collection of edits and refinements — including additional diagrams and some move corrections. Added four new moves: Arm Jive Swizzle, In And Out, Shoulder Drop, Slow Backpass. Updated the Basket and the Yo-yo — the original versions are “Classic” versions. Removed two partial moves. All moves are now “counted”.
New items include: Modern Jive Class Levels, Events, Venue Bars, A Learning Perspective, Class Freestyles, Performance (And Freestyle) Anxiety, Avoiding Inappropriate Physical Contact, Avoiding Unwelcome Behaviour, Balance In Leading And Following, “Toes”, Follower's Handhold, Body Positioning And Flashlighting, Follow The Leader's Timing, Stopping The Rotation, Rotation Arms, Leading Travelling Rotations, Spotters, Learning To Lead Moves Behind The Back, Lady's Styling, Fast Footwork, Wiggling, Building Confidence, Presentation, Team Costumes, Showcase Music, Walking, Salsa Suelta, Beginner's Moves Table, Musical Tempos Table, Potential Mistakes, Music For Teaching, Sight Lines And Visibility, Rotating The Class, Bite Sized Chunks, Equipment, Sound, Lights and Mixing
Expanded items include: Pairing Up, Rotating, Respect Your Partner, Breathe, Eye Contact, Floor Craft, Signalling Is Not Leading, Cruel To Be Kind, The Point Of Rotation, Turns, Following Turns, “Acrobatic Moves”: (Dips, Drops, Lifts And Jumps), General Tips For Acrobatic Moves, Fast Music, Slow Music, Light And Shade, Non-Dancing Hobbies, Argentine Tango Music and Learning Techniques
A comments mechanism using the AfterFive Wiki has been integrated into the on-line guide.
A Wiki is a collaborative writing environment. Add your own thoughts on Modern Jive (or other dance forms) via the AfterFive Wiki. Similarly, use the AfterFive Wiki to add comments about “Modern Jive — A Dancer's Guide” — some early drafts may also be found there.
The usual collection of edits and refinements — including some move corrections.
New items include: Smoke Free Venues, Taxi Dancers, Non-Traditional Leader And Follower Roles, Thank The DJ, Energy For Movement, Balance In All Things, Styling Hands Carefully, Elbow And Connection, Bouncing Hands, Taking Hands, The Point Of Rotation, The Rotational Axis, Dancing With Beginners, Musical Structure.
Expanded items include: Learning To Learn, Entering The Dance Floor, Respect Your Partner, Floor Craft, Stepping Backwards Carefully, To Circle…, …Or Not, Leading Lunges, Acrobatic Moves, Dance styles, Teaching And Learning.
Too many updates to list in detail.
New sections include: “How Modern Is Modern Jive?”, “Modern Jive History”, “Asking For A Dance In Other Dance Styles”, “Breathe”, “Eye Contact”, “Stepping Backwards Carefully”, “Dealing With Slotted Dance Styles”, “Learning To Lead — including exercises”, “A Robust Dance Frame”, “Leading The Follower To Move Backwards”, “Teapot Position”, “Leg Leads”, “Leading An Injured Follower”, “Hip And Shoulder Spins”, “Leading Multiple Double Handed Turns”, “Teaching Techniques”.
Modified sections include: “Calorie Expenditure”, “Shoes”, “Dance Floor”, “Entering The Dance Floor”, “Respect Your Partner”, “Where Does The Lead Originate”, “Offered Hands”, “Closed Dance Hold”, “Spins, Turns And Pirouettes”, “Dip And Drop Safety Tips”, “Musicality”, “Dance Styles”.
New: photo mode for moves — unfortunately, not many photos yet but hopefully this will improve over time.
New: movemap — helps to show the possible leading options from each part of every move.
New: improved description of the “cartoon” notation.
New: consistently coloured hyperlinks in XHTML and PDF versions.
Updated: defunct links now link directly to pages on the Internet Archive.
UK Jive have kindly added AfterFive to their links section on the UK Jive website.
Uploaded version 0.6 of “Modern Jive — A Dancer's Guide” — there are some minor editorial changes, but this is more of a “technical upgrade”. Hopefully all of the webpages should now be XHTML1.0 compliant, and email links should work again.
Hopefully, the “upgrade” will be more successful second time around! And finally added a few belated thankyous.
Richard Johnson kindly mentioned AfterFive in the cool links section on the Jiveoholic website. If you enjoy the AfterFive site, then why not enrol as a gold member at Jiveoholic — the move descriptions and animations are extremely useful.
Belated thanks to Crispin Horsfield for adding a link from his LeRoc information website — I have many happy memories of Crispin's Fairspin LeRoc classes in Bristol at the Elmgrove centre.
Uploaded version 0.5 of “Modern Jive — A Dancer's Guide”, featuring:
More hints'n'tips. Plus, thoughts on criticism and floor craft.
Rearranged “General Tips” chapter, added new “Competition and Showcases Routines” chapter.
First (prototype) double trouble move.
RTF version now prettier.
More (and consistent) bookmarks in PDF.
Belated thanks to Vanessa Parkin for adding a link from the Dancing Crazy website — much appreciated.
Uploaded version 0.4 of “Modern Jive — A Dancer's Guide”.
Things are heating up:
John Brett kindly mentioned AfterFive in his Modern Jive newsletter.
John Gimber kindly added a link to AfterFive on his Leroc in Bristol website.
AfterFive has been added to Google, so it should be easier to find.
AfterFive got its first (fan) mail.
Uploaded version 0.3 of “Modern Jive — A Dancer's Guide”. Most of the major work has been in updating the chapters, a couple of minor revisions have been made in the moves part — the bibliography has been reworked and infrastructure is in place for a more comprehensive index.
A few updates:
Uploaded version 0.2 of “Modern Jive — A Dancer's Guide”.
Fixed PDF versions of guide to improve the layout of the dance moves.
Fixup broken CSS file.
Finally, after years of slaving over a hot keyboard, I'm proud to announce that the first draft of “Modern Jive — A Dancer's Guide” is now available.
For convenience, the guide is available in a number of formats for download. A list of the tools used is also available.
The AfterFive website has been in a state of disrepair for sometime, but has now been relaunched in demo form with a different look. All comments appreciated.