When someone tells me that they have two left feet, I tell them that I do, too. I am not a quick study, and it takes my brain a long time to turn teachers’ examples into instructions for my legs. However, when someone tells me that they can’t dance, I ask if they have ever tried to learn. Dancing, like singing in tune or playing the drums, is a learned skill. It’s not magic. Yes, some people do grasp the principles more quickly than others, but with good coaching and practice, anyone can dance. (Rather poignantly, there is even wheelchair dancing.)
Yesterday’s dance party (which I think of as Michaelmas Workshop 2) was a success: there were (for the most part) 7 women and girls to dance with the 11 men and boys, a waltz lesson, a ceilidh lesson, and a “free dance” in which the gentlemen freely chose to ask the ladies to dance. Forty chocolate chip cookies, two bags of crisps, and most of a bottle of squash were consumed. The guests came from our Edinburgh TLM community but also from the Cathedral, the Jesuit church, and Glasgow. There were new, and nearly new, faces.
One of the highlights was dancing with a Glasgow teenager relatively new to our terpsichorean community. Perceiving that he was waltzing very well indeed. I praised him, and he said something along the lines of: “Can you believe that two weeks ago I didn’t know how to dance at all?”
He had practiced over the week, having the great advantage of a sister at home. The Top Stars of Mrs McLean’s Waltzing Party are a brother and sister team, and an attending parent marvelled at their skill. I observed that Fred Astaire’s first dance partner was his sister Adele, and obediently chose a “Swing” over a “Waltz” on my phone at the Top Stars’ behest. They proceeded to tear up the floor, and there was applause.
“Professional swing lesson next week,” I reminded the admiring crowd.
I’ve noticed that contemporary critics of traditional social dancing rely rather more on the internet than on lived experience for their arguments. If they attended MMWP parties, they would struggle to find something to object to.
For the waltz, the ladies clasp the gentlemen’s left hands with their right and place their own left hands on the gentlemen’s right shoulders or biceps. The gentlemen place their right hands on the ladies’ left shoulder blades. (When we first began in 2023, I put stickers on all the girls’ left shoulder blades to show where they were.) Everyone’s torso is at least two handbreadths’ apart from their partner, and usually further if they are still in the looking-at-their-feet stage. (Some of the ceilidh dances involve a waltz or polka step using this frame, too.)
Then for swing-dance, we start off with the kind of “side hug” fashionable in American youth ministry (we in Scotland are mostly not huggers), and afterwards we are literally at arms’ length at least half the time. If anything, we then resemble yo-yos, and–as in all our dances-we are too concerned with keeping to the beat and not stepping on feet to let our minds drift idly into dangerous paths.
MMWP have come a long way since February 2023, but we don’t yet resemble the YouTube Stanford Viennese Ball 2013 video (where, by the way, the partners are also usually at least two handbreadths’ apart). We still less resemble the glitzy productions of “Strictly Come Dancing”, which I have to watch in bits on YouTube, as Mr McLean refuses to watch it on TV. We don’t, as do traditional Polish folk dancers, place our hands on each other’s waists, but the Krakowiaczek, for example, does indeed look like fun. (She ponders the possibilities but discards them as impractical for Edinburgh dances for Catholics who love the TLM [and those who like us].)
Another highlight of yesterday was seeing the young pillars of MMWP chatting with the newcomers, some of whom voiced their delight that such events are being held for Mass-going Catholics. Best of all, I think, was watching the young men stop standing around drinking squash (or checking their phones) and going over to the benches of young ladies to ask them to dance. That’s a learned skill, too, as is accepting or refusing gracefully. Perhaps, like waltzing or any other kind of formal dance, it could best be described as “a social art.”