Routine plans

Our debut at Portsmouth Kite Festival was also our last flying at a festival for the year, so time to start looking ahead to the 2014 festival season. What are our plans in terms of routines?

First of all, our existing "Ruthless Queen" routine. We had been tweaking things a bit already since Malmesbury Kite Festival, and at Portsmouth we flew it with an improved (we think) thread and end sequence. And if you have been visiting our Facebook page lately, you may have seen that we're also playing with the start.

So that will give us our base routine for next year, but improved in a couple of places. However, we also want to have a bit more in our portfolio. And, again, if you have been visiting our Facebook page, you may have seen that we're now seriously working on a second routine, to the theme music of 'Jaws', and purely for our Fish and Shark kites. And in that routine, we want to try and include a wee bit of a story, with the Fish being chased by the Shark (will it be caught in the end???). We've been making real good progress with this routine, and no doubt it'll be ready for the 2014 festival season.

Which made us think we might try to start working on one more routine ... Our "Ruthless Queen" routine is basically flying with the music, using the music as backdrop. Ultimately we want to fly routines where the movement of the kites mirrors the music. The "Jaws" routine does that a tiny little bit in places, but not to any great extent. What we decided to do, in order to gain experience in flying specifically to the music, is use a routine that has already been choreographed to music, and which we found in a book by Ron Reich (of Top of the Line fame) on pair and team flying. The music is "Chariots of Fire", and the entire routine is given in the book, with time points throughout. Learning to fly this routine will give us experience in flying a routine precisely timed to music, no matter the speed of the kites, and that experience will then help us choreograph a routine to music from scratch in the future. I imagine that, certainly at the beginning, a lot of sticking in front of the computer will be involved!

So those are the routines we will be working on over the next half year or so. Maybe a bit ambitious, but we'll see how far we get by the spring of 2014.

Picture credit of us at Portsmouth: Roger Backhouse