Around the World in 13 Scottish Country Dances

Around the world in 13 Scottish Country Dances, Marcela Galve and Maria Solange Grimoldi

Around the World in 13 Scottish Country Dances is a publication aimed at primary school children published by the BASC Dancers in Buenos Aires. It includes 13 dances with music and some background on an animal that lives in that area of the world, with either a short story to introduce the character or a fact file. Additionally, there are 13 games and activities relating to each dance to reinforce the things learnt about the animals. After each dance description there are ‘Find out’ questions where the children (and adults!) can find out a bit more about each animal. The dances vary in difficulty with many of them allowing the dancer to develop their footwork but also other elements of good technique such as covering, teamwork, handing and eye contact. Each dance has a tune to accompany it, which relates to the part of the world that the dance is about. This leads to some of the tunes being well known to some of us and other tunes being more unusual but still fitting the dance. The first dance is Cornie, the Unicorn, Joins the Dance which is a four couple 32 bar jig. There is a simple cast to the bottom as the form of progression, with four bar turns with right hand and left hand also in the dance. This allows for practice of phrasing and covering to name just a couple of the technique elements that can be introduced and worked on to give a great presentation of the dance. The first strathspey in the book is called Meet Mrs Kiwi. This is for three couples in a four couple longwise set and so the introduction of doing a dance with the top three couples and then again with the bottom three couples is introduced at a tempo where things are a little less frantic. It does include a progressive promenade to bring the first couple to second place, but the other formations in the dance are more straightforward. Sakura Invites You to Tokyo is the only square set in the 13 dances. It is built up of simple formations with either the first and third couples dancing followed by the second and fourth couples, or the girls dancing and then the boys. This allows dancers to learn the valuable idea of watching what other dancers are doing if they have that moment of forgetting what they are supposed to be doing. Dart the Dragon introduces moving pas de basque in both a variation on balance in line and a poussette. It is nice to see the poussette being used as the progression in the dance as it is often overlooked by devisers, myself included, as newer (are they really improved?) formations are used. The last dance in the book, Ethan from Australia, is the trickiest. It has some good step transitions and I think will be a good dance to use for eye contact and awareness of the other dancers in the set. All the dances are well written with different things to concentrate on in each dance. I can see children and adult beginners enjoying each of the dances as they master the different formations and technique. For those teaching new dancers, whether they are children or adults, I would recommend buying a copy of this book. It allows for great fun while learning, together with finding out a little more about the world we all live in. Alasdair Brown, Glasgow Branch Available from the RSCDS Leeds Branch shop:

http://rscdsleeds. uk/index.php?id_product=1274&controller=product