Nobody's Watching Claudia Colvin

In this episode I’m joined by Charlotte Fowles, whose musical lockdown project was called one track dance party. It was a real commitment: every day three times a day (in the morning, at lunch time and in the evening), she danced to an upbeat song and invited people to dance with her on zoom. She did this for months, hosting it herself, and only missed it once or twice. It’s still running now and a few co-hosts have joined and help her out. When this conversation ended I felt like I had spoken to a Disney sage. Charlotte is an executive coach and gives extremely wise advice on all sorts of things: from how interrupt our habits and patterns can bring creative breakthroughs, to how to find the strength to show up to something when you don’t feel like it. 

This is Charlotte's coaching website, I recommend reading her resilience tips https://www.charlottefowles.com/

Here are some of communities she mentions:

YesTribe

Love Her Wild

Adventure Queens

In this episode I’m joined by Priyanka, whose lockdown project was to teach Bollywood dancing online every Sunday morning. Priyanka is a finance manager by day and an incredibly talented choreographer and dancer when she’s not wearing her finance hat. I was absolutely blown away when I found out just how much experience she has in dancing. She performed on stage as a child, touring with a talent show, run by famous Bollywood music director duo Padmashree Kalyanji and Anandji Uncle. In this episode we talk about how dance positively impacted her confidence, her resilience and her time management. We dive deep into what it was like growing up with these incredibly ambitious dance goals to balance on the side of school. And if you don’t know much about Indian dancing, you’ll learn today because she gives us an overview. Here was our conversation.

PS if you don’t know what BTech dance is, neither did I! It's basically an equivalent of a dance A level, with different modules like Contemporary, Choreography, Tap and more

Here is the video she references in the episode with the dance moves of a parent cradling a baby 

And here are two other videos to give you a flavour of her beautiful dancing

Video one https://www.instagram.com/p/CFccrc9hEER/?utm_medium=copy_link

Video two https://www.instagram.com/p/CBfRyh5nWuS/?utm_medium=copy_link

Hi and welcome to Nobody’s Watching, a show about the benefits of music, singing and dancing. I’m Claudia, your host, and I’ll be interviewing be interviewing experts, amateur dancers and music lovers, to collect stories and scientific research on the positive impact of music and dance. This first series is be a collection of interviews with people who had some sort of musical lockdown project. 

Nobody’s Watching is also the name of my dance business: I organise and host uplifting dance events for amateur dancers. Since November, that’s also involved organising Wake Up & Dance: every Monday, Wednesday and Friday I send 3 uplifting songs to dance to so you can start your day with a sweat and smile. Many of us connect and dance together on zoom but you can also dance offline in your own time. To learn more and sign up, check out my website https://www.nobodyswatching.co/

Today I’m joined by Anna Doble, whose musical lockdown project was to listen to her collection of 300 vinyls, in chronological order, and document the process. Anna is a journalist, currently Digital Editor for the BBC World Service programme, where she leads online journalism and social media strategy around podcasts, radio and video content.

In this episode she tells us about the memories that her project unlocked for her. We talk about the intense connection between music and memory, how musical lockdown projects helped us connect to people in a different way, and how the way in which we listen to music has evolved over time.

At the end of the episode we take a little detour and talk about how Anna’s incredible audience engagement work helped the hit crowd investigation podcast Death in Ice Valley win podcast of the year and best use of crowdsourcing or citizen journalism at the drum Online Media Awards in 2019.

I asked Anna for music recommendations at the end of the episode: here are the two albums she recommended.

http://www.saintetienne.com/music/so-tough/

https://theorielles.co.uk/videos-and-streams

And this was her original piece for the BBC https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-56187737

This is part 2 of the conversation with Rick Barter. If you haven’t heard part 1, I recommend you start from there. In part 2, Rick shares some fun, non-dance related stories from his past, which include how we almost got deported from France, how he landed a translation gig at the Atlanta Olympics, and how he ended up in Yoko Ono’s kitchen. At the start of episode 1 you might remember Rick’s reaction when I told him I had researched him online. I told him everything I found was very innocent, but in this episode you’ll hear me to try and source the juicy stories live. Listen till the end to find out if I was successful.

Today I’m joined by Rick Barter, whose musical lockdown project was called Dance with Uncle Ricky. Starting at the end of March, every day, for 100 days, he shared a song to dance to and a fun personal anecdote or little know fact about the song on Facebook. He numbered them and it became a ritual that his friends keenly awaited every day. I wish everyone could have an uncle Ricky in their life. He’s an endless source of fun and good stories because he’s had an adventurous life, guided by the principle of doing one thing that scares him every day. I met Rick because one day, that thing that scared him was attending one of the silent disco events I had organised on a London rooftop. He came, he danced and he loved it so much that he just kept coming back, and we became friends after dancing together almost every week for a year. Rick is now 61; he was born and raised in New York City but he’s lived in Paris, Vienna, Beirut, Gran Canaria and London. Our conversation was beautiful and it was long, so I’ve split it into two episodes. In this first one, we talk about his lockdown project, about what it was like growing up queer in New York in the 70s and 80. He gives us a visual description of a New York dance club back then then, tips on how to skip in public and much more. 

Here is the playlist collecting all the songs he shared, in the order in which he shared them.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3k99MGqONSBhC06WhhiZGc?si=12c54f01c8cf4082