Dutch Shufflers - Summer Shufflin

Millie, Pim, Rodney and Musti from Dutch Shufflers, show us what they've been doing over summer 2009

Dutch Shufflers / Dance Max

Millie and Pim from DANCE MAX in the Netherlands, form the Dutch Shufflers crew. They're both well known regulars on MSO and we have enjoyed their shuffling vids for ages.

Their latest vid shows us they just keep getting better. Great sound track too. Well done guys. Check it out.

Dutch Shufflers will also be featured on the MSO shuffle documentary Global Shuffle.

Dutch Shufflers rockin' - Pim & Millie 2009

Dutch Shuffler visits Melbourne

In February 2009 Millie came to visit Melbourne and be interviewed for the Global Shuffle dvd.

Millie is from the Netherlands and has a dance crew called Dance Max. Here's Millie's vid he's made of his visit.

Dutch Shuffler in Down Under

Millie is best known for being in the worlds first commercial shuffle track/video Melbourne Shufflers - The Shuffle, around the beginning of 2008.

Melbourne Shufflers - The Shuffle.

It was great to meet Millie. I took him to a few places in the CBD that were significant oldskool sites.

It's hard to explain the Melbourne underground, it's much easier to show it. We have a lot of back alley's, basements and upper floor buildings that the underground houses itself in. All have obscure nondescript entrances. Often just a simple doorway with stairs.

These are to discourage the mainstream. They look of no interest at first glance, but if you are in the underground, these are passageways into another world, literally in the main street of Melbourne, but unnoticed by most. And that's the way we like it.

The underground has different attitudes to mainstream Melbourne, from the way people dress to their behaviour. The behaviour is most important, it's friendly.

Just finding an underground venue, is like you have completed the first initiation test. We like to think of it as a treasure hunt. You need to put some effort into it, and you are rewarded for your effort.

The Lounge (Swanston st Melbourne) a longtime underground venue was one of these places.

Established in the last global recession of the early 1990's in a disused upstairs retail storage area, Carlos the Lounge owner proudly tells visitors "The Melbourne Shuffle was practically invented on this dance floor", and he's right.

1992 a shuffle club night called Switch commenced, it was renamed a short time later as Filter and became the world's best and longest running shuffle club. Held at The Lounge Wednesday nights every week for 11 years (1992-2003), it was the underground's inner circle club of choice.

It has a concrete floor polished smooth by shufflers feet for 11 years, and it's still exactly the same now, and you can still shuffle on it and the exact same stage as these oldskool shufflers in 1995.

Filter @ Lounge 1995

Here's the 1995 video footage of shufflers on the same Filter stage.

Today the Lounge still operates, but Shufflers may find it a bit ordinary as it is mostly just a sit down day bar with meals these days, catering for an older 20's - 30's mostly mainstream urban crowd.

So say hello to Carlos if you bump into him, tell him Garry/MSO sent you, and if he has the time, he's more than happy to chat about shuffling. After all, he's seen it all from the beginning.

You can still have a bit of a shuffle on the original dance floor and stage though, among the tables, and it's well worth doing as homage to one of the greatest original oldskool shuffle clubs of the world, Filter and it's fantastic crew The Filter Army !

It's the closest you can get to the original oldskoolers these days, by literally shuffling in their footsteps.

Dutch Shufflers in Melbourne

 

I've spent the past few weeks explaining Melbourne's weather to Millie from the Dutch Shufflers.

Millie's on his way to Melbourne in a couple of weeks and I'll be showing him some of the historic Shuffle sites around Melbourne and interviewing him for the Global Shuffle DVD.

It's about zero degrees in the Netherlands on a warm day at the moment, and yesterday it reached a record 46C in Melbourne. It gets much higher inland.

But as quick as that peak is reached it dropped 20 degrees in about an hour when the cool change came through last night and now the next day it's a chilly 16 degrees and raining outside, and I'm thinking about putting on the heater !

So this is pretty common in Melbourne, these dramatic changes, and we take them in our stride, there's little else you can do about it ;) It's part of Melbourne character.

We live between two feuding jet streams in Melbourne. One to the north draws hot moist air from the tropics, then super heats it over 2000 kms of hot desert and blasts Melbourne with it, as you can see in the weather map of yesterday 7 February 2009 below. Melbourne is about where that bottom red arrow is, covered by the northern jet stream.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then today 8 February 2009 the Jet Streams Collide. The southern jet stream has pushed it's way up north with cold air straight from the south pole over 3000 klms of antarctic ice chilled sea - Antarctica has 90% of the worlds ice.

Like these jet streams have the whole of the southern hemisphere to play in, and they choose to have a turf war directly over Melbourne !! Why not out at sea ! grrrrr

So what should Millie bring for a Melbourne summer in 2 weeks ? Plan for Everything :)

We'll be shooting around the Melbourne CBD in about two weeks. If you spot us come up and say hello.

Here's the latest from the Dutch Shufflers, with some great shots of the crew.

Dutch Shufflers

Antwerp Shuffle Meet Up

Good to see our shuffle friends from Belgium, Cray and  Enira who run  http://www.unrestricted.be/  getting into the shuffle spirit and meeting up with a couple of dutch shufflers. Much better than the online bagging dutch shufflers have been hit with on various forums the past 6 months or so ;)

See guys, doesn't matter where you come from, if you're a true shuffler, you let each other be who they wanna be, and just get on with shuffling ;) - if they can keep their eyes off the girls walking past long enough lol.

Nice to see some Bass Agents hoodies in the vid and on the sound track too. - Bass Agents will be doing some tracks for the upcoming MSO DVD Doc to be released in 2009.

So, Well done guys, lets see more of this !

>>> "Melbourne shuffle meeting in Antwerp - Belgium, hosted by Unrestricted BE. Also present that day were dutch shufflers like Pim and Miljano. It was great! "

Antwerp Melbourne Shuffle meeting - edited by Millie