Unless you are already proficient in the Schuhplattler or know someone who is, you may peruse some of the hundreds of websites that purport to teach the dance. Many of these are confusing, the dancing is too fast, and the dancers are shown facing you, which makes it hard to know which hand or foot to slap or step with. However, the Alpenrose Schuhplattler group of Orlando, Florida, has several excellent videos of the Heitauer, Reit im Winkel and Gauplattler, showing the dance both in slow motion and up-to-speed, and they have one dancer facing the camera and one facing away, so you can watch whichever one you find most helpful. If you have a good video editing program, you can make a similar version of any Schuhplattler you find on the web by slowing the tempo and making a mirror image of the video.

Choosing & Designing Your Schuhplattler

Once you know some of the Schuhplattler moves, you need to choose a basic dance for your kids to learn. There are some 150 basic Plattlers to choose from, as well as marches, Ländlers, and acrobatic figures that can be added to fill out a complete dance. A typical full Schuhplattler might include an entrance march, the Plattler, a second march, the Plattler again, and an exit march. If this seems like a bit too much marching and too little dancing, you can cut the entrance and exit music and include other material between the Plattlers.

Your performance may also include girls in dirndls twirling about the stage as the boys slap and leap, or having the boys and girls dance together, but this is beyond the scope of our website. In any case, teaching the slap-dance to boys and girls in lederhosen will probably be the most challenging part of your work.

The basic Plattler and the march are usually each sixteen measures long, and the march usually turns and moves in the opposite direction after eight measures. A “shuffle march” is standard, but many groups have found interesting variations. Acrobatics and choreographed rough-housing are especially appealing to kids and can be found in the Ranggler and the Schuhplattler Tramin’s Fasslschwänzer.

The sound of slapping and stomping is a major feature of the Schuhplattler and the best surface to dance on is a wooden floor, but if you will be performing on asphalt or grass, you may need a dance that does not have a lot of stomping. Alternately, you can make adjustments to a standard dance that normally begins with stomping, provided the traditionalists aren’t watching.

Dance Notation

In his book, Auf Geht's: Das Buch übers Scuhplatteln (1990), Franz Hegenbarth presents several notation systems that have been used to record Schuhplattler figures, and others can be found online. It may be more convenient to devise your own, and one such “homemade” system can be seen on this page. If you are familiar with Reit im Winkel, incidentally, you will see that this version has been altered to remove the big stomps at the start of the dance, since in this case it was to be performed on grass, and stomping on grass would not have been a very exciting way to begin a performance! Purists may be horrified to see a traditional Schuhplattler modified in this way, but if no one is around to enforce the rules, go ahead and create a dance that works for your kids.

Schuhplattler in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Bavaria