Monkey Business!

Sometimes you'll hear me say: "No tags, no restarts, no monkey business!" in this week's blog post, I thought I'd give you an explanation about what these terms mean.

Years ago, line dance choreographers would just write a set of steps, and that would be that - and if it didn't necessarily "line up" accurately all the way through, nobody seemed to mind. For example, the popular dance "Commitment" from back-in-the-day has a move called "Elvis knees" that is danced when the lyrics say "weak in the knees"... on wall 1. But after that, the move and the lyrics happen at different times.

More recently, choreographers have used "little extras" to make their choreography fit the music a little better - here are some examples:

• A "Tag" is an extra set of steps put in to make the music fit the steps better. You might hear me say something like, "at the end of wall five, dance an extra V-step..." and that extra V step is called a tag.

• A "Restart" is where you don't dance the wall all the way through, you'll hear me call this a "short wall". For example, in "Green Green Grass AB", on wall 2, after the V steps, you start your next wall by walking forward. Restarts are easier than tags, because you're taking something out, rather than putting something in.

• A "Tart" is a tag and a restart at the same time.

• A "Step-change-restart" is very similar to a TART, but it's a smaller change to the choreographed steps before restarting.

• A tempo-change is where you dance the original steps, but to a different timing. An example of this is in "Do Si Dough" at the end of Wall 2 and 6. Or sometimes, you just need to listen to the music and adjust your dancing to meet the music - for example in Coastin', you'll hear me say "it's about to get quicker...!"

When I first qualified, the rough rule-of-thumb was, absolute beginner dances had none of the above "monkey business", and neither did beginner dances. Improver dances were the places to introduce this type of adaptation. These days however, even Absolute Beginner dances sometimes have one or more of these included. Originally, I took a dim view of this, but these days, I'm a little more relaxed and I've noticed that even new dancers can cope with a little "monkey business", particularly if it's easy to hear.

What are your thoughts on this? Are they worth it to make dances fit their music better, and line dancing is the better for it; or are you more of a purist, and think it's best kept to improver dances only?