From time to time here at Musically Speaking, I will talk about folk or social dancing. For some of you, that may seem a bit weird. Why would a music/choir teacher and hymnology guy find interest in promoting group dancing? If you haven’t already done so, look at the above video. This particular dance is called the Postie’s Jig. It’s Scottish in origin, and one theory is that it is called “Postie’s” or “postman’s jig” because the arches motion represents the tying of a knot in old parcels from back in the day, as is pictured below in this old Red Cross parcel.
There is much that could be said about the picture associations in dance. But in brief, sound/wholesome group dancing like this helps paint the music in a great way. That’s why I try to encourage folks not to dance to this music so fast that they can’t be attentive to how the steps of the dance can “Amen” the music visually. The YouTube video below similarly shows how the Postie’s Jig can be elegant and graceful.
If this is the first time you’ve seen clips about social or folk dancing such as this, then I hope you see just how wholesome it is. I also hope that you see the fun is ultimately not in just blitzing through the dance steps as fast and as rough as you can, but rather in enjoying the flow and feel of the dance when it beautifully pairs with the tune being danced to that particular time.
Teaching 175 Teenagers to Dance with, not at the Music
Last summer at our Jubilate Deo Summer Music Camp here in northeast Louisiana, we worked on teaching and refining our ability to dance with the music. Above is a short clip of a combined practice where we made considerable strides to get the dancers to actually attempt to stay in sync for each of the difficult sections of the dance. Many of these dancers knew this dance but had never really attempted to wait and try to dance together with the other sets and with each section of the song. Many of them could do the moves quite well, but they hadn’t seen the beauty and fulfillment in getting to the next level of enjoyment where they could “paint the music” by attentively dancing with the music. It was wild and crazy at first, but seeing these 175 junior and senior high students learn and refine their abilities to dance together was neat. The Postie’s Jig is a complicated dance, and I was so pleased at the end of the week.
To borrow from C.S. Lewis, they had played with the “mud pies in the slums” but had not experienced the joys of a “holiday at the beach” in the sand. In other words, they had danced the fun complex Postie’s Jig to a variety of popular and folk tunes that were enjoyable and accessible to them. They were “too easily pleased” with the mere raucous movement of the steps with little attention to the music’s form and beauty. In large part, this is because many of them had not fully experienced what it was like to dance, where the music was not incidental (or background) to the dancing but integral to the dance’s beauty and joy. We had to retrain them to be disciplined and submissive to the music’s beat, tempo, and form. Last summer’s practice set up the video progress seen at the beginning of this post. It was taken a few months back. What a transformation!
'Painting the Music'