The Tulsa Shuffle Line Dance Club is run by Mick and Wendy Bennett. Mick plays the music and teaches the dances while Wendy provides the charm, organisation and interpersonal skills (Contact us).
The club has been up and running, in various guises, since July 20th, 1999 when Mick took a series of BWDA (British Western Dance Association - now renamed Best Western Dance Academy), courses and became a qualified line dance instructor.
Our first real (paid) 'gig' was at Bullwood Hall Women's Prison which lasted for over six months (we got time off for good behaviour!!!) teaching linedancing to a collection of inmates. Only one of us (Mick) was allowed in and that was only after he had been vetted by the police (yes, they did use an anaesthetic). Believe it or not, the inmates were a (largely) polite bunch of ladies who mainly preferred 'funky' music to Country. Wendy and I both prefer Country wherever possible, but you can't win 'em all!
We also worked the Mazenod Hall in Leigh-On-Sea for a couple of years and Dunton Park Country Club (near Laindon, Essex) from January to October 2000, where we had small but friendly and very sociable clubs running. We've also spent some time at Prince Avenue School, Westcliff and The Green Baize Club in Leigh.
From October 8th 1999 to June 2003, Mick was a Line Dance tutor at Southend Adult Community College in Ambleside Drive, Southend, teaching three classes a week to beginners and intermediates. Wendy was usually there too in order to 'work the back row' so that the students always have a guiding pair of feet to look at and also someone to initiate the heckling I get (we try our best to make the classes fun as well as instructive). This finished when college bureaucracy finally became too much of a burden.
On Sunday, July 16th (2000) we accepted an offer to host a segment of the Spitalfields Community Festival at the Old Market in London, E1 - we ended up doing nearly twice as long as we were scheduled to do as everyone was joining in. Fascinating place - interesting gig too being sandwiched between a poet and The Lost Marbles String Band !!! (Front Page + programme)
April 30th, 2001 saw us close at the Mazenod Hall and open at a new and slightly larger venue at Prince Avenue School. We stayed at the school for just about 26 months until we moved to The Green Baize Club. It was a tad smaller than the school and had no stage from which to teach, but was more suited to our needs and the friendly nature of the club and also afforded me (Mick) the chance to 'mingle' a bit more.
In mid 2002, people within our club and externally were asking us if we could do another night a week, and "how about a regular party night?". Well, it took us some time to find a suitable venue, but regular Saturday party nights started in November 2002 at St. James' Church Hall in Leigh-On-Sea (directions & dates). We were lucky enough to take over at St. James' Hall from a Kick-Boxing class who moved to the smaller adjoining hall and started another weekly club night from Wednesday 8th January 2003.
In late 2003, we were invited to apply for a forthcoming Monday night vacancy at The Ambleside Club, in Ambleside Drive, Southchurch as the folks currently running the club (Pearl & John) were about to retire to Kent. We wish them a long and happy retirement. We were fortunate enough to be selected by the committee even though we were not the only applicants and moved there on January 5th, 2004 where we've held our Monday night club ever since.
All evening venues enjoy the same format: we start the evening at 7:00pm and it goes on until 10:30pm. The first hour is for beginners after which we have free dancing (requests are welcome and encouraged). The beginners are most welcome to stay for the remainder of the evening as they will undoubtedly pick up some of the dances and can also get up and learn the more complex dances taught after eight (Contact us).
For some time now, we've been offering pre-beginner sessions (a ½ session before the actual beginner session starts) aimed at teaching novice dancers the absolute basics and thus helping them to integrate into the beginner session. We're also teaching a few of the 'after 8' dances to the beginners to enable them to 'mingle' more with our more experienced dancers (trying to 'bridge the gap'). So far, so good. It appears to be working well with many beginners now staying for longer and longer during the evening.
We are extremely happy with the way that the club has developed. We have a good core of regular dancers many of whom are relatively new to Line Dancing together with a number of more experienced dancers. We think that the club is a friendly, social place to be where the music is not too loud so people are able to have a chat if they want to, and no-one feels self-conscious or pressured into either dancing or not dancing.
As an ongoing project, we are still very much into 'finding out about our members' and building a club 'play list' - finding out what people know and what they like to dance to. As well as this, we try to stay as current as possible and teach (roughly) one new (modern) dances every week in addition to the ever increasing number of requests to go over dances that were never learned properly or have been around for longer than people have been dancing and so have never learned them. We are currently in the throes of reviving a lot of oldies that have been consigned to dimmer recesses of out memories.
Like most other line dance clubs, we try and 'do our bit' for charity whenever possible, our favourite being Retinitis Pigmentosa (Charity Details) - a friend of ours, Margaret, is actively involved in fund raising, so the charity has a great deal of personal relevance for us too. Any other requests e.g. Ladies Clubs, Social Events, even Cub Scouts once!!!! (once I got their attention (not too difficult as I had a microphone with many watts of power behind it and a big cowboy hat) they did surprisingly well for 'first time' youngsters - photo) are considered and 'fitted in' wherever possible.
We found out in December 2002 that some of our members had got together and nominated Tulsa Shuffle as Linedancer Magazine Club Of The Year and that we had made it to the last 22 and were listed in December's Linedancer magazine. Both Wendy and I were totally lost for words and it took a while for it to register with us. I'm not sure I fully believed it until I saw it in the magazine. Wow!
We were postally notified by Linedancer at the end of December that we'd not made it into the next selection phase, but they sent us a really nice certificate (58K download) confirming our nomination. Thanks again to all the folks who thought enough of the club to forward our nomination in the first place and those who supported and encouraged us throughout. To paraphrase Uriah Heap - "We feels ever so 'umble".
In January 2003, we received a telephone call from Nicola Humphries, a researcher from BBC Radio 4 who were in the process of formulating a series of programmes on different forms of dance. Mick was interviewed and a club night was recorded (for posterity?) on Monday, 10th February.
Mick also teaches at Club 60 at the Queensway Centre, Southend-On-Sea for an hour every Wednesday morning
To date, Mick has choreographed 13 dances (including one co-written with Wendy, but not counting those made up 'on the fly' at a Special Needs function we did a while back for Retinitis Pigmentosa) and others spontaneously concocted to teach specific dance step sequences to the beginners and pre-beginners classes.
We also do 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's disco work, as well as, fairly obviously, specialising in Country Music and/or Linedancing events.