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[rivka]

This afternoon, as we've done a couple of times before, we went to a family dance sponsored by the Baltimore Folk Music Society.

The way they've set these up, there's a family dance from 5-6:30pm, then a potluck, and then American folk dancing (contra and square) for adults. Both groups share a caller and dance band. Um, supposedly. This time, the band was very very late - they still hadn't arrived by the time that we left, when the family dance was nearly over - and so the caller had to accompany himself on guitar or fiddle. It's a testament to his considerable skill that this worked at all; in fact, it worked very well.

The family dances seem to follow a particular rhythm: they start out with simple folk dances and dancing games for the first half, and then in the second half there's more of a skill-building focus. The second half of tonight's dance was an introduction to square dancing, leading up to a fairly complicated square dance. ("Duck for the Oyster," if you follow these things.)

Alex was the youngest walker there. (telerib and moeticae had Baby Spud in a sling.) For the first two dances, she was my shadow - we held hands and participated as if we were one dancer. (That's what the youngest children usually do, so that they don't have to change partners away from a parent.) After that, she rode on a hip. She did amazingly well when she danced - she did a rough approximation of the steps, kept her focus on the dance, and showed great stamina. And she danced with such joy. She just grinned from ear to ear. Her clear favorite was the Kinderpolka - she even asked me to "sing it" on the way home, which seemed to mean talking out the steps. My favorite was Sasha, a wildly popular (in folk dancing circles), raucous pseudo-Russian dance that the caller couldn't resist putting in when he realized he had not one, but two different Alexandras at the dance.

The other Alexandra is someone I've seen at English Country Dances since she was about four years old and riding on her father's shoulders. She's now nine or ten and has become an accomplished dancer - when we did a cakewalk at the end to win a free pass to next month's dance, she spontaneously did an impressive set of clogging steps. It was cool to see.

I'd like to get more closely involved in the Folk Music Society again myself, and I'd like us to do the family dances more regularly. I had been thinking that we were in an awkward time for that, with Alex too big to be carried and too little to dance herself. But she did great. And it seems like such a wonderful first structured physical activity: it's fun, it builds strength and coordination, it has the potential to be a lifelong hobby, it brings you into a supportive intergenerational community, and there's absolutely none of the competitive or figure-conscious baggage that comes with more traditional activities like team sports and classical dance. And oh, did she ever love it.

Comments

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

Oh, that sounds like fun!