“Come for the [TLM], stay for the dance,” said one of my adverts for yesterday’s event.
It was our second ceilidh designed for the under-12s and their parents. This time we attracted fewer out-of-town families, but we still had a big enough crowd to make the Dashing White Sergeant work properly and have a satisfactory Strip the Willow at the end.
I once read on a Scottish Country Dancing site that children shouldn’t be brought to ceilidh dancing until they are 11. This may be true for general ceilidhs, where huge men gallop like water buffalos. However, I have learned that even four-year-olds are perfectly happy attempting the simpler ceilidh dances, and some three-year-olds can manage them if they dance as one with their mums or dads. Infants can be carried by dancing parents in a backpack or allowed to do their own thing on the dance floor, skilfully avoided by children used to dodging baby siblings. Our youngest dancer bobbed up and down to the music and at some point lost his shirt.
Meanwhile, the under-seven set, as yet unsaddled with reason, seems to be gifted with boundless enthusiasm.
“When does the dancing start?” cheeped a little voice at my feet during After-Mass Tea in the parish hall. I beheld a small blonde, not yet three-years-old, and crouched down for easier hearing. Apparently she has been talking about the “dance party” since the first children’s one in January.
I think that it was the ceilidh band, not the dancing itself, that was her real interest, for at some point she found a tin whistle and began to toot along beside the musicians. This time we had three: a pianist, a fiddler, and a flautist. And it strikes me that it is valuable not only that small children dance with each other and their parents but that they see and hear live folk musicians.
We didn’t have only folk music, however. After the company navigated the Gay Gordon, Dashing White Sergeant, Canadian Barn Dance, Flying Scotsman and Virginia Reel, I called an intermission and turned on The Jazz. This provided those adults and children who have learned to swing-dance an opportunity to practise.
It was also meant as a time for refreshments, but the children had rushed the table after each and every ceilidh dance. Bags of crisps, a banana bread, 1.5 dozen homemade cookies, a dozen shop-bought biscuits and almost all of a homemade chocolate cake were reduced to crumbs in a surprisingly short time.
(Happily, I held back some of the homemade cookies for the intermission, and I believe the chocolate cake was a later addition, too. Years of experience as an After-Mass Tea Lady have taught me that biscuits must be both plentiful and dispensed gradually.)
After the intermission, we performed the Gay Gordon, Dashing White Sergeant, Canadian Barn Dance and the Virginia Reel again. (The Flying Scotsman was dropped as too many had found it too confusing.) Then we had a glorious Strip the Willow, and sang the Regina Caeli. This last was led by the cleric who had arrived on an errand and stayed to eat the last of the homemade cookies.
And then it was only 4:20 PM, so I popped on The Jazz again, and I perceived that even more couples were taking to the floor to illustrate the the joys of Lindy Hop and Collegiate Tobacco. Two siblings, middle children of a dance-loving family, were relatively small; they had been given lessons by their older brothers and sister. I pictured their paterfamilias being woken in the middle of the night by the faint strains of Duke Ellington and going into the large dining-room of his Arts-and-Crafts cottage to discover most of his progeny dancing the jitterbug in their nightclothes.(I’m not sure that’s exactly how lessons were conducted, but I like to think it was.)
The hall’s jannie turned up early–about 4:50 PM–and kindly brought me a broom. He went away again and returned with a hoover, vacuuming up the piles of crumbs I accumulated. Yes, one of the important lessons I have learned about organising dance parties is that where there are small children, there are crumbs.
Meanwhile, the musicians played for love, happily accepting no more than donations, so I am very grateful to them. I cannot overemphasise how wonderful it is to have a dancing party with live music. Families dancing together, mums and dads dancing together, and children of all ages dancing together in a pleasant room while musicians from their community accompany them: it’s just wonderful.