Pantheacon (16) – Dance!

Both the easiest and the hardest workshop to talk about, the next one.  I assisted at it:  My wife’s dancing workshop.
 

Dancing is like music (it uses music, after all!) – once you become comfortable with it, you can relax and go into trance while doing it.

Many people have issues with folk dancing.  They were forced to folk dance or square dance in the fourth or fifth grade and have resented it ever since.  Or they’ve always felt klutzy and self-conscious when it comes to their bodies and movement; they’ve been taught to think of themselves as ungainly, ugly.

I learned some square dancing and folk dancing in the fifth grade; I liked it.  I got to dance with the girl I had the crush on.  About this same time, my parents were buying a series of books that were tours of foreign countries, with slides and recordings.  That’s where I heard my first Greek and Bulgarian music.  Later, in Germany, I would hear Balkan music on the radio from distant lands.  In graduate school, I began to learn folk dancing myself.

The music of the Balkan Peninsula, where many popular folk dances originate, shows a strong middle eastern influence:  Unexpected rhythms, strange (to us) scales, unusual harmonies.  I’ve always found it particularly conducive to trancing.  In addition, when you dance these dances with your friends for an extended period, the experience can lead to a profound bonding of the group.

Of course, you have to get used to the movements; that can be challenging if you haven’t done this before.  But my wife is a good teacher, with years of experience and extensive background; her parents square danced and talk Round Dancing.  She taught, I turned on the music.  Always fun, to get a little movement into your Pagan practice!

Folk Dancing

On a whim last night, I went folk dancing after the South Bay Writers Open Mic in south San Jose.  I jumped into my car after tossing my books and papers into the trunk, calculated briefly (it was already a quarter to ten) and drove twenty-five miles up the highway to Palo Alto to find the Stanford International Folkdancers.  I was there by 10:20.  I had forty minutes to dance.
 

And not forty, really.  Because when I arrived the group was doing its announcements, not dancing.  For a moment I was afraid they were preparing to end early.  To one side of the entry a table lay spread with refreshments:  Someone’s birthday.  To the other side of the door lay musical instruments:  an accordion, a double-bass, some kind of mandolin.  People described upcoming events, chatted, and snacked.  Perhaps I’d be heading home soon after all.

But the music started up again; not from the live band and musicians, but from the recordings made decades ago in eastern Europe; which, after all, is what lured me into folk dancing in 1974—almost forty years ago!—when I was in graduate school in Virginia.

My big dancing era ended around 1990, when I began to suffer back problems.  Since then I have danced only occasionally.  Yet I still remember the dances that were burnt into my feet and soul in earlier days.  So when the Stanford Dancers announced they were doing “Orijent,” I joined right in with this fairly straight-forward dance from Serbia, one of the first dances I ever learned.  Later came “Šestorka,” a more spirited Serbian dance; and “Jovano Jovanke,” slower and more lyrical; Macedonian.  Then “Ali Pasha,” just a bit faster but still lovely to sing, from Turkey.

I hadn’t done any of these dances for some time—in the case of “Šestorka,” probably not for five or ten years.  Yet I remembered them.  They were truly etched into my brain.  In my first few years of folk dancing, I learned hundreds of dances, mostly from eastern Europe.

But that is another story, to be told more fully at another time.  But it is fair to say that folk dancing is a constant that has followed me most of my life.  Whatever dancing I do in the time remaining, the music will never leave me.  The music and I have been together since around when I was ten—another story indeed, since my family has no eastern European roots.  I first heard Balkan music in a recording from Columbia Records.  Why it attracted me…certainly has something to do with my own childhood and family.  To be told another time.