All the Way Around

“Oh, you dancers make me so bad!” said Kathryn Wedderburn, as she introduced one of her Rock and Roll contra dances. Clad in a black dress, her sultry voice cooed into the microphone. Then the band started up, featuring guitars, drums, a guy who can play two saxes at once, and a pair of “contra-ettes”, her backup singers. Dancing contras to rock music Sunday afternoon was nothing less than spectacular. A girl who had never contra danced before, I later learned, thought that contra dance was invented to accompany rock and roll, with a dance for each Golden Oldie.

Between the two of us, Lisa and I put in about 65 hours of dancing, listening to music, and volunteering at our kickoff dance event, the Dance Flurry 2007 in Saratoga Springs, NY. Contrast that with the roughly 9 hours we each had of sleep over the weekend, and you have some idea of the way I’m feeling as I write this post.

The Dance Flurry is a yearly event in which Saratoga Springs is taken over by the dance community. The City Center and the Saratoga Hotel, both enormous structures, house dances and other events throughout the weekend along with five other Saratoga landmarks: the town Hall, an old casino, a Hebrew Temple, a pub, and the Saratoga Dance Museum.

The main hall of the City Center is possibly the largest room I’ve ever danced in. At the peak of the festival, there were probably over 1000 dancers on that one floor.

Unfortunately, the floor itself was made of stiff concrete, and the noises of stomping and clogging one normally hears at a contra dance were notably absent. One person I talked to called this confusing– “If I don’t hear the stomps during a balance or a long lines, I feel like I’m doing something wrong.” In place of the stomping sounds were loud squeaks coming from all directions as the dancers’ shoes scraped the floor.

Luckily, the callers and musicians made up for this by producing amazing noise of their own. The bands I found the hottest were “the Sevens”, made up of contra musicians from around the country, and Genticorum, a band from Quebec.

Genticorum deserves particular recognition, along with the French Canadian square dance caller they brought with them named JF Berthiaume. He called some of the most exciting squares I have ever danced to, made all the more exciting by the fact that I don’t speak French. Most of his calls were in French, which was fine for moves borrowed from the language, like “Promenade”. But the rest of his French calls had to be learned the old fashioned way–trial and error. Even some of his English calls took some getting used to, like “Change the way!” for “Turn around”. All the while, Genticorum treated us to crooked Quebecois tunes. “The real stuff,” as the caller said.

This was my fourth Dance Flurry, and attending this weekend reminded me why we chose this festival as our sendoff. No where else that I’ve seen can you dance Tango, International Folk, Latin, Swing, and Contra, and catch part of a concert by a band called the “Balkanics” in the space of a few hours. I spent a great deal of time contra dancing, but I also attended a dance callers workshop, a tango lesson, a keyboard style workshop, a clogging class, and that’s just scratching the surface.

One workshop I will not soon forget was a tune writing workshop hosted, among others, by Nelson piano player and contra dance legend Bob McQuillen. I had been taking piano lessons from him for a few months until having to take a break because of this trip. Close to the end of the session, Bob had a couple musicians play a new tune he wrote. At the end of the piece, he announced to the attendees that the tune was called “Eisenstadter’s Hornpipe” and that it was named for me. I was completely speechless. “Just in time for you to hear it,” he told me with a wink.

During the last set of contra dances in the main hall, the Sevens and Genticorum teamed up to play my favorite contra dance: Chorus Jig, for which this blog is named. Even after the caller announced he was ending the dance, the bands just went on playing, and 1000 people danced contra corners.

Other highlights of the weekend: Kathyrn Wedderburn’s Rock & Roll Contra rendition of Patsy Cline’s “Walking After Midnight;” Ray Price’s ability to play the bagpipes with his band, Trouz Bras, while teaching an hours worth of dances from Celtic Brittany; Peter Amidon making it tolerable to dance in the cement floor Main Hall; waltzing on the dusty hardwood of the music hall floor; and seeing the signs and hearing the acknowledgements everywhere, “Thank You For Saving the Dance Flurry!”

Lisa was even mentioned in a PostStar article, though the reporter took the liberty to make the trip sound more interesting…
http://www.poststar.com/articles/2007/02/17/news/doc45d7d2f4249aa433094792.txt

We saw many of our dancer friends, and it was so nice to dance with them all as a sendoff for our trip. Dancing in the Northeast is truly incredible, but we already knew that. What is left is to see what the rest of the country has to offer. Pictures to follow.

New Paltz, NY

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 18th, 2007 at 11:37 pm and is filed under 01 New York. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.