Downtown Blues

Exciting news! We’re thrilled to announce a Blues Dancing Workshop with the incredible Annette Kühnle on 5th & 6th April 2025!

No matter your skill level, this workshop is your chance to learn from one of the best in the blues dance scene.

Annette’s passion for blues dancing, combined with her expert teaching style, will help you strengthen your moves and grow as a dancer.

Workshop Class Descriptions:

During this workshop we will explore some exciting topics:

• Fancy Fast Feet: Join in for this dance-intensive alliteration that may just literally rock your socks off! After a proper warm-up and body awareness session to get off on the right foot, we’ll tackle and break down plenty of fast footwork, find out how to get our feet up to speed in a comfortable way and add a healthy dose of connection technique to bring our Blues dancing to the next level!

• Vaudeville Blues (Classic Female Blues): From around 1920 to 1930, it was the great female Blues singers who spread the 12-bar Blues all across America through the Vaudeville theatre circuit. Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Mamie Smith, Ethel Waters, Ida Cox, Victoria Spivey and many more, fundamentally shaped, codified and recorded the Blues in a way that made it internationally recognizable as its own art form. Let's explore this beautiful, slow style of Blues music with its lyrics anywhere from sad to raunchy, through relaxed walking in close embrace with a gentle sway or two.

• Late Night Slow Grooves: Originally very popular in the Black Juke Joints of the American South and ever since then continuously danced whenever singer and guitarist are having a slow-off, Slow Drag and Grind were close embrace dances done to slow, emotionally intensive Blues tunes and ballads. Find relaxation in your hip section and be challenged with intra-body Blues grooves that might look simple from the outside but are intriguingly complex once you dig deeper.

• Emotion in Motion & Variation Challenge: At the core and the essence of Blues is personal, emotional expression. As dancers, how can we express the emotional story arch of the music through our body movement? How do we go from “doing the steps'' to “being moved from within”? In this class, we’ll work on incorporating universal and personal human expression into our dancing through practical, hands-on and fun exercise sessions. All while challenging ourselves to consistently keep our movin' n' groovin' varied and engaging, reaching deep into the toolbox of variations. Join in and express yourself!

Workshop Levels:

This is an All Levels workshop but we would encourage you to attend at least 3 Bluesday Drop-in Classes prior to the workshop. 

Annette will be teaching new moves and styles so that both beginners & advanced dancers will get the most out of this workshop and enhance your Blues dancing.

Special Session: Structure, Dynamics and Storytelling

What are the dynamics behind the structure of a Blues song and how can we express them in our dancing? In this deep-dive, music-history-dance session, we’ll find out why the Blues sounds like it does and how we can throw ourselves into the underlying and pervasive framework of classic Blues so that we can incorporate it into our dance. 

Join in and you may find whole new levels of inspiration in the music!

Venue Information:

Workshop classes, Special Talk & Social Night will be held at InDance (72A Francis St, The Liberties, Dublin 8, D08 XC52).

Annette hails from Heidelberg, Germany and is one of Europe's most prominent champions for blues dance as a teacher, social dancer, DJ and organizer. Her love of teaching and dancing are infectious and if you've traveled for blues, you probably already knew that!

Annette is excited to be teaching in wonderful Dublin again, and she is looking forward to helping you bring out your inner awesome!