Playford Ball report.

[rivka]

Last night was the Baltimore Folk Music Society's annual Playford Ball - my third since I've been doing English Country Dancing. It was a lovely, lovely evening. I think there were around 100 people there, which meant plenty of room to dance - last year the sets were so squashed together that movement was unpleasantly constricted. This year we still had three longways sets across the hall, but the individual dancers were able to spread widely enough apart that, for example, if the dance called for backing up you could back up through the line behind you, instead of coming up short against a wall of backs.

I love watching an entire hall full of people who know how to dance well, all moving in precisely the same patterns at precisely the same time. Each individual dancer has their own flourishes and puts their own stamp of personality on the patterns, but at the same time you have a hundred people dodging and weaving in such perfect synchrony that everyone is in exactly the right place and no one even bumps elbows. It's gorgeous.

I got to dance with curiousangel and wcg (who rose from his sickbed, brave man, although you couldn't tell it from watching him dance), and - yay! - with helygen, who came down for the weekend to attend the ball. She made quite an impression on the men present, in a simple and elegant dress wcg made for her.

The band - a group from Philadelphia and New Jersey called "Hold the Mustard" - was excellent at building and sustaining the energy of the crowd. Their bluesy interpretation of Smithy Hill (link is to an mp3, but not of "Hold the Mustard") sounded like it came right out of an after-hours lounge, and led to some pretty ridiculous, and yet fun, strutting and sauntering in the set I was in.

The food was excellent - little morsels of potato and herb-filled puff pastry, mini quiches, savory little meatballs, seven or eight kinds of gourmet cheeses, cold asparagus spears, zucchini, and bell pepper strips with two different dips, fancy breads cut into ornate shapes, mini cheesecakes topped with glazed fruit, rich little chocolate desserts. It was almost enough to make me forgive the woman in charge of the kitchen for being snippy about letting anyone in during afternoon ball practice. (This was a vast, uncramped kitchen, capable of handling eight or ten kitchen workers without anyone being tripped over, and there were only two people preparing food in it. But she was still mortally offended when I entered to get some water, because I was allergic to the only drink being served, and then again when curiousangel entered to get an ice pack for my injured ankle.)

The only thing that marred the evening for me was that someone criticized my dress. She was wearing a gorgeous concoction of embroidered white silk, and as I was asking about it she turned up her nose at mine because I wasn't wearing a bum roll or paniers beneath it. I explained that my dress was a copy of a specific 18th century gown that hadn't been worn with figure enhancers, and she treated me to a condescending little lecture about how wrong I was to think that 18th century dresses were ever worn without them, and how I had probably relied on an ignorant, inaccurate source for my pattern.

Probably everyone who's ever been in the SCA is laughing and rolling their eyes right now, but my feelings were genuinely hurt. In the first place, she was just wrong about the style of my gown - but even if she hadn't been, it's not like the Playford Ball is supposed to be about historical accuracy in dress. People were wearing anything from modern formalwear to sweeping gypsy/hippie dresses to African robes to, yes, reproductions of 18th and early 19th century clothing. People wear whatever they think is festive. It's supposed to be about dancing and fellowship. I have no idea why she thought it was appropriate to go out of her way to put me down.

curiousangel suggested that I accidentally spill my glass of cranberry punch over her white silk gown, but I restrained myself. Later on, when we were in the same set, she kept trying to make eye contact and smiling broadly at me. I don't know whether she thought our conversation had been friendly, or what.

Comments

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

Ah. Prior practice explains some of the relative perfection. Otherwise, the lack of walk-thoughs causes me to think of balls as really scary events. Driving in a NASCAR race when one is still trying to learn how to not pop the clutch, per se.

In local weekly dances, I've had veterans physically grab me by both shoulders and push me into the next starting position when I was too far off-track. These tend to be exasperated older male dancers, the experienced women have been friendlier and more likely to explain or point (rather than the shove-and-glare approach ;).

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Prior practice explains some of the relative perfection. Otherwise, the lack of walk-thoughs causes me to think of balls as really scary events. Driving in a NASCAR race when one is still trying to learn how to not pop the clutch, per se.

If you enjoy the dances (even in theory), I hope you'll stick with it long enough to make the crossover to experienced dancing. I think that happened for me after about six months. I started dancing in May of 2001, and by the time my first Playford Ball came along in October I was still really dependent on practicing the ball dances via walk-throughs. I enjoyed dancing and was reasonably competent, but I really had to think about it, and I had to be taught each dance.

But by the time of the New Year's Eve dance just two months later, I was able to pick up the new dances just from having them described and then called for the first couple of rounds. So somewhere between mid-October and Dec 31 I crossed over.

In the first stage, you're still trying to learn the steps. (It took me some time before someone finally explained the concept underlying a hey in terms that made intuitive sense to me.) In the second stage, you know the underlying steps, but the way they're put together keeps coming as a surprise - so you're always a beat behind the caller, hurrying to keep up and do the next thing. The third stage comes when you start to anticipate the ways in which steps are likely to fit together, so that you can sort of feel how one move sets you up for the next.

I don't know of any way to get there but practice. :-) It also helps me to listen to CDs of English Country Dance music.