Texas Shuffle Intensive & the Eastside Kings Festival

September 8-10, 2017
The Eastside Kings Festival is a Texas sized blues bash: two days of 30+ blues bands playing in 8 venues (several bars, a couple parking lots, and even under the tin shed in an auto-repair joint), all within a single block in Austin. For only TEN DOLLARS A DAY.

https://www.facebook.com/EastsideKingsFestival/

We want all y'all to be able to experience it, so we figured we'd sweeten the deal a little bit, and invite Damon and Kelsy Stone out to teach a four hour intensive in the Texas Shuffle! This fun blues idiom dance involves a lot of fancy footwork and partner interplay, and we think y'all'll love it (or if you already know it, will love a chance to really dive into the details).

But it's a mini-exchange...while you're welcome to fly to Austin to experience the Festival, we've only got 40 passes total to sell to the workshop itself, so you'll want to jump on registration as soon as it opens (we will try to provide local housing for those who sign up for the workshop as possible)!

What is the Texas Shuffle?

Ross Blythe and Kelsy Stone (the couple on the left)
​doing the Texas Shuffle
Damon Stone & Heidi Fite demo the Texas Shuffle

Meet Your Instructors

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Kelsy Stone
San Francisco, CA

Kelsy brings her lifetime of dance training, a passion for vernacular dance, and a sharp eye for technique to the Blues dance world. She has brought her joy and knowledge of blues idiom dances to some of the most high-profile events in the US, including but not limited to: bluesSHOUT!, The Experiment, and Nocturne Blues--serving as faculty, mentor, competition coordinator, and judge.

Kelsy's critical eye and love of deep technique are tempered by her love of "dad jokes," getting lost in the music, and embracing of the ridiculous. She shows her appreciation of African American culture by speaking of the history of Blues idiom dance and taking her craft seriously, but never herself. She believes every mistake is an opportunity to learn, every class an opportunity to challenge, and every dance an opportunity to pay respect to those who came before.
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Damon Stone
San Francisco, CA

Damon has been dancing his entire life, starting with vernacular Jazz/Blues first taught to him at the tender age of six by his grandmother. After nearly a decade of learning at the heels of his elders, he went on and eventually studied a score of different dance forms until coming full circle in 1995 to focus primarily on the history and styles of Swing and Blues as his family danced them with a special focus on the Southern styles from the Mississippi Delta region. He has studied the development of vernacular Jazz/Blues dance across the United States learning from a number of the original dancers. He is largely regarded as one of the foremost authorities on Blues idiom dance, a long time board member of the Northern California Lindy Society, member of the California Historical Jazz Dance Foundation, and has been interviewed as a dance historian in documentary and for radio. Damon has been a featured instructor at camps, festivals, and workshops across five continents.