Goings On Nearby
Tags: Culture & Traditions
Saturday night we attended a dance that was held in the Bras d'Or Lakes Inn. It was a Winter Festival activity sponsored by The Municipality of Richmond County and the Destination Richmond Tourism Cooperative.
From 8:30-9:00 there was a refresher of the Grand River set that we had learned a couple of weeks ago. We also did the Inverness Set, as it is done locally, which we had muddled through a couple of years ago. We had a lot of fun and laughs as we danced our way through the sets. Our caller, Claire, is new to much of the figures as are most of the participants, with only the older folks having some memory of how the sets go. The older gents did some discussing, arguing and memory-prompting as they tried to get the order of the figures as they danced them in the past.
The idea is to record the various dances, while we still have folks among us who know them, so they will not be lost forever. In the process, there has been no small amount of tweaking - during the dances - and that makes for a certain amount of chaos. At one point, all three sets were doing something different and there was even some inadvertant intermingling of people in the sets when a grand chain went off on an unscheduled tangent. Add to that a woman dancing the gent's part and you get some confusion, which explains 5 women moving clockwise and 3 men going counterclockwise around the set. Hoo boy. As long as we all remember to laugh instead of getting our britches in a twist, all is well. This is supposed to be fun.
In the book "The Flowing Tide" Pat Murphy recorded the Inverness South Square Set in Halifax in 1996 but it is not the same as the Inverness Set we do here. More confusion. This appears to be the only Nova Scotia square set he recorded in either of his books.
Yesterday was Gaelic day. We met with several other folks to do our level best to become conversational in the old language. Some folks are doing better than others, I'm not making much progress but Kit is coming along nicely with it. No matter what, it is always fun and we are good at laughing at ourselves and with each other in a good-natured way. This seems to be a particularly humorous bunch, which helps, not to mention using a unique variety of stuffed animals as props (platypus, weasel, mooing cow, cur, sheep).
I hope our postmistress is feeling better after her bout with the flu.
Saturday night we attended a dance that was held in the Bras d'Or Lakes Inn. It was a Winter Festival activity sponsored by The Municipality of Richmond County and the Destination Richmond Tourism Cooperative.
From 8:30-9:00 there was a refresher of the Grand River set that we had learned a couple of weeks ago. We also did the Inverness Set, as it is done locally, which we had muddled through a couple of years ago. We had a lot of fun and laughs as we danced our way through the sets. Our caller, Claire, is new to much of the figures as are most of the participants, with only the older folks having some memory of how the sets go. The older gents did some discussing, arguing and memory-prompting as they tried to get the order of the figures as they danced them in the past.
The idea is to record the various dances, while we still have folks among us who know them, so they will not be lost forever. In the process, there has been no small amount of tweaking - during the dances - and that makes for a certain amount of chaos. At one point, all three sets were doing something different and there was even some inadvertant intermingling of people in the sets when a grand chain went off on an unscheduled tangent. Add to that a woman dancing the gent's part and you get some confusion, which explains 5 women moving clockwise and 3 men going counterclockwise around the set. Hoo boy. As long as we all remember to laugh instead of getting our britches in a twist, all is well. This is supposed to be fun.
In the book "The Flowing Tide" Pat Murphy recorded the Inverness South Square Set in Halifax in 1996 but it is not the same as the Inverness Set we do here. More confusion. This appears to be the only Nova Scotia square set he recorded in either of his books.
Yesterday was Gaelic day. We met with several other folks to do our level best to become conversational in the old language. Some folks are doing better than others, I'm not making much progress but Kit is coming along nicely with it. No matter what, it is always fun and we are good at laughing at ourselves and with each other in a good-natured way. This seems to be a particularly humorous bunch, which helps, not to mention using a unique variety of stuffed animals as props (platypus, weasel, mooing cow, cur, sheep).
I hope our postmistress is feeling better after her bout with the flu.
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