strathspey@strathspey.org:8394

Todd Pierce

Re: Mairi's Wedding

July 31, 1997, 10:21 p.m. (Message 8394, in reply to message 8323)

The Mairi's Wedding thread has me thinking...a previous message said

>The joy ofSCD is that one can dance anywhere from New Haven to New Plymouth and know
>that a given dance will be danced  (almost) the same wherever one is.  It
>is very uncomfortable to find that a "local" variation has been introduced
>in a dance that one is sure one knows!

One of the reasons I enjoy SCD is precisely because of the local
differences. Doing a dance exactly the same way everywhere would get
rather boring - imagine if every restaurant you ate in cooked food the
same way! Thankfully, we have regional cuisines and ethnic dishes. Why
not have regional dancing? Just as you find a good recipe from another
part of the world, you can bring home an interesting dance variation
and try it in your own dance group. (I'm thinking of 'Wilder Geese' as
I write this!) If everyone danced the same way, or did the same dances
on each programme, there would be little reason to travel to other
cities to dance.

As for twiddles in dances...I teach my group the way a dance is
written, then point out the variations they may find (such as
twiddles, or right hand passes in Mairi's Wedding, or 'flippy turns'
in Duke of Perth, or having 1st and 2nd couples dancing Petronella). I
encourage beginners to refrain from doing the 'extras' until they know
the 'correct' dance version. From there, it's up to the individual
dancer and the collective dancers in the set to decide if now is the
time and place for extras, or if it should best be held off for this
dance. We're all adults here, and my group doesn't need me constantly
supervising them.

It seems to work well that we have one or two dances where we can all
cut loose, such as Mairi's Wedding, after doing all the other dances
properly.

Todd Pierce
xxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Scottish Country Dancers of Caledonian Society of Baton Rouge, LA
(not an RSCDS-affiliated group or branch, if anyone wondered - and I'm
not trying to make any statements
by pointing this out to you - just might help explain our local attitudes a little better)