The basics:
Dance: Why Don’t U Stay
Choreographer: Tim Gauci
Music: “Stay” by Ronan Keating
Description: 2 wall, 32 count intermediate line dance with 1 restart
The review:
“Stay” is a nice little ballad by Ronan, despite its slightly adulterous lyrics. If I had been tackling this one personally, I would have said that it suited a 48 count dance, with a restart somewhere on the fifth or sixth wall, rather than the approach Tim has taken. Interestingly, it resembles the phrasing used in another of his dances, “Someone 2 Love” – and the similarities don’t end there. It’s not like Tim has taken whole sequences from a previous dance to make his new one, but there’s enough “flavour” in common between the two that I would probably suspect they had the same choreographer – starting with the “interesting” use of textspeak in the dance names.
One thing about “Why Don’t U Stay” that is soon apparent is that this is another one of those dances where the song is slow but the steps are often quite fast. As well as being filled with lots of half-counts, many of those involve changes of direction and/or momentum which are occasionally tricky to pull off quickly. Probably the best examples of this are at counts 5-8 where you suddenly turn a quarter and have to push back to go into a quick back lock step, followed immediately with a half turn and a pivot; and counts 15-17 where you turn 1/4 left and then suddenly hinge 1/2 right. These steps are definitely do-able, but they add an element of jerkiness to what could be quite a smooth dance.
There are some very interesting steps in the dance as well – after the hinge turn, in counts 17-20 the side, rock, cross step with a “1, 2&” rhythm feels suitably dramatic, and while it comes almost straight out of “Man of My Word” by Jennifer Hughes and Darren Mitchell, it slides straight into place here. A bit more interesting is the ending of the dance in counts 25-32. It starts with what is essentially a forwards coaster step and two sweeps back, but the second sweep suddenly becomes a 1/4 turn into a back coaster. If this we happening in the half counts, like the beginning of the dance, I would probably have some harsh words to say about it, but done here in slow counts it’s unlike any other dance I can think of, but definitely different in a good way.
If Tim had taken out about half of the half-counts, this probably would have been one of my favourite dances of 2012, but even with them in it’s hard to dislike this dance.
