Author: Dorothy McLean
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Planning dance parties like a (Christian) Stoic
When I was very young, I enjoyed a lot of drama. It added spice, i.e. dopamine, to life before we all got hooked on the internet. Books provided Laurie’s unrequited love for Jo, and television served up the helicopter chases of “Scarecrow and Mrs. King.” Real-life drama, e.g. who didn’t get invited to Randy’s birthday…
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Social graces
I have a bad cold and so was unable to dance this week. And the cold got me because of a pipe that blew up in the bathroom floor, necessitating the immediate shutdown of the boiler and thus of the heating system. My shock and horror at the damage to our downstairs neighbour’s bathroom probably…
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Dancing in the Old Town
Gavin Hamilton, Susanna Kennedy (1689-1780), Daughter of Sir Archibald Kennedy, 1st Bt of Culzean, 3rd Wife of Alexander Montgomery, 9th Earl of Eglinton, oil on canvas, The National Trust for Scotland, Culzean Castle, Garden & Country Park. She went to Edinburgh’s first Assemblies.
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Dancing is for everyone
This may be obvious to you, but for too long it wasn’t obvious to me: you don’t have to belong to your local “dance scene” to dance partner dances. I may have got the idea from a professional performer friend of mine: she was and is a pillar of the Montreal swing dance scene. She…
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Learning to teach Lindy
My usual advice to would-be hosts and hostesses is not to teach your guests how to dance yourself. “Delegate” is my watchword. “Delegate, delegate, delegate.” Ideally you do nothing on the day of your event but welcome your guests, ensure that they have a good time, bid them goodbye, and pay the bills. However, we…
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Practise practice
“I wish I had a sister at home to dance with,” sighed a young man I know. We had been at Lindy Hop class, a story in itself. For complicated reasons, which I will explain later, we have eschewed the usual “rotation” so much a feature of swing-dance lessons. This means that the young man…
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A Period Piece
Having decided to read more fiction about dancing, I purchased Rosamond Lehmann’s Invitation to the Waltz (1932, republished by Virago, 1981). It is an interesting rather than enjoyable book; there is an atmosphere of sexual threat throughout, and 1932 is not nostalgic for 1920. There is an unspoken message that bringing up teenage girls as…
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Strip the Willow for Soldiers
There are dances traditionally for women, dances traditionally for men, and dances traditionally danced by both sexes together. Then there is Scottish Highland dancing. “Friday night was always dancing night,” begins George MacDonald Fraser’s unforgettable story “The General Danced at Dawn.” After a long preamble about dancing, the narrator unfolds the story of the inspection…
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A Music Lesson
The more you know, the more you know you don’t know. This great truth was brought home to me while discussing the tempo of waltz music for the Second Annual Michaelmas Dance with my pianist brother. I had sent him weeks before a list of 6 waltzes, and he dutifully practised them according to the…