Retro FCBD® with Wendy Allen
This series on RetroFCBD prop balancing was filmed in 2020. Since, in the early days, we
always wore head wraps, I’ve included tutorials on head wraps for both sword and basket,
since each has its own needs, followed by a lecture and demo, and drills at the end.
As you’ll see, our prop work was quite different from the prop work seen today. It involved
some modification of the steps to adapt to balancing an object on the head. It is so simple
compared to the modern dialects.
As such, prop work was considered a specialty to be used sparingly, sometimes only for a
portion of a song.
In the early 00’s, we did experiment a bit with different prop work, including veils, which can be seen in San Francisco Beledi, and Basket, which was in videos that weren’t released publicly.
Course•By Wendy Allen
