Dancing the night away

Since my son started School in January, my wife has become quite involved in the parents’ association, and it’s various fund raising events.

This was why I found myself in the local village hall with my wife last Saturday night, to attend a ceilidh (pronounced something like ‘kaylee’). If you are British, then you’ll know what one of these is (I hope), but for those of you not familiar with this Scottish tradition, I suppose I’d better fill you in. A ceilidh is, I suppose a little like American line dancing. It’s a traditional Scottish folk dance performed by a collection of couples, accompanied by a traditional band with instruments like fiddles, whistles, accordions and a bodhran drum. A caller explains steps that the dancers then perform, making complex patterns, usually of intermingled people across the dance floor.

I’ve been to a ceilidh before, a couple of years ago. I didn’t join in. This time though, I was determined to take part. To this end, I dragged my wife up for the first two dances. I felt this was psychologically important, because if I had taken part at the start, when everyone was still finding their feet, I’d feel less out of place. This little trick worked, and both me and my wife took part in all but two of the dances across the whole evening.

It was fun!

It really was good fun, and I didn’t feel out of place. Most of those taking part (and there were fifty or so of us) had clearly never done much dancing, never mind much ceilidh dancing. We were a bunch of novices that made countless mistakes, and laughed about them as we made them! Fabulous!

This all meant that no-one noticed the extra little mistakes that I was making. The funniest of these was where we had to stand in a circles and then wheel either to the left or the right. I have trouble with left and right at the best of times – I have to consciously think which is which when someone asks me to do something that invovles a left or right action. So it was that for the first few dances we’d be commanded to ‘circle left’, and I’d be standing still thinking for a half second whilst the circle was already moving in the correct direction. In the end I gave up trying to think about it, and just went with the direction the circle decided to go. That worked nicely!

I found, to my own surprise that I didn’t have a problem keeping the rhythm of the dances, indeed many others were far worse at this than I was. I’ve commented in the past that I have no rhythm. This clearly isn’t true. I don’t dance well or imaginatively – that’s a better description, because clearly in a prescribed dance such as a ceilidh I can have a good go at the steps, and can keep the rhythm quite well.

Some dances had sequences of eight or ten different moves. I found these difficult from the point of view that I’d mix up the sequencing. I punctuated these dances with little verbalised reminders to myself – “right wheel, pass partner, dosey doe, oh – no – promenade then dosey doe – sorry, polka” – that sort of thing. Despite the sequence of moves repeating every minute or so for a good five minutes, I’d still make the same sequence errors each time. Oh – and because of the intense concentration on the moves and the sequencing, I didn’t hear much of the music – it just washed over me providing the rhythm and nothing more. That’s a shame, because the band were rather good, I thought.

What I really wasn’t good at were the knots. These are complex moves performed in small groups where everyone holds hands and then people weave through each others arms and spin around to unwind the knots they’ve created. We’d try these slowly and a little repetitively without the music first, and then perform them in the dance. Whilst I’d feel I’d understood how it worked when we first tried it out, I’d inevitably have forgotten the intricate details by the time we danced, just a minute or two later. How did the other dancers manage? Well some managed the knots, and others didn’t, and everyone found them difficult.  Perhaps the difference here is that I was paying very good attention as to how the move worked and then still failed, whereas some others having trouble were clearly taking things far less seriously, and weren’t paying as much heed to the instructions as they might have.

So the dancing was fun, and because it was complicated and we were all amateurs, I didn’t feel self concious about getting bits wrong, or about forgetting the sequence of moves. Others were making the same mistakes.

What wasn’t so much fun were the social bits in between the dances. The dancing is hard work, so the format was typically two five minute dances and then a 15 minute break for people to recover. In these breaks, many of the attendees wandered around and chatted socially. My little group of me, my wife, my wife’s friend and her friend who we’d not met before didn’t really mingle. This suited me fine – the dancing was hard work mentally as well as physically, which didn’t leave much room in my head for making small talk. Even in our little group I kept mostly to myself, and listened more than I talked. My head was full of dance moves and how they worked.

I wondered before the start if I’d feel over-stimulated by the music and the noise. In reality I didn’t feel it as much as I thought I might. I was a bit blank during the breaks, and undeniably tired at the end, but elated. And the elation over-rode any feelings of over-stimulation.

Would I go again?

Yes. The combination of someone else telling me how to move, plus everyone being an amateur who made mistakes really did work well for me.

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