Interview with Sophie Rickebusch Jimmie Hill interviews Sophie Rickebusch, secretary of the International Branch, and recently qualified teacher.
Sophie teaching in Poland in 2009
Why did I think you were Swiss? I was born and grew up in Vevey, Switzerland, but my father is French and my mother English.
But you are living in Edinburgh now. Yes, I am currently working at Edinburgh University for three years, doing postdoctoral research in landscape ecology at the School of GeoSciences. It’s all about climate change and that sort of thing.
When did you start Scottish country dancing? I started when I was 23. My mother had learned Scottish country dancing at boarding school in England. She had enjoyed it, so we both went along to the local group at the Scots Kirk in Lausanne. When I first went along, it was just a social group with no teaching of technique. When the teacher returned to Scotland, our new teacher was RSCDS qualified. Up till then I had enjoyed the patterns and the figures, but my own dancing started to develop with the RSCDSstyle teaching. That’s when I started going to workshops outside the Lausanne area. I then realised there was this huge community of
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Scottish dancers all over the place. When my work took me to Zurich, I joined both the local groups. It was a great way to get an immediate social life. One of the teachers encouraged me to go to Summer School, where I took my preliminary certificate under the old system, then went on to do Unit 5 under the new one. While I was qualifying, I was very lucky to have a group to teach in Zurich, but then I moved to Grenoble where the group already had a teacher. Now I am in Edinburgh where there are lots of qualified teachers!
How did it feel arriving in Edinburgh? It was a bit like Christmas! You can dance every night of the week here – and often with live music. When I first arrived, I went out four or five nights a week, but I have calmed down a bit and realised there is more to life!
You obviously know a lot of the young Europeans who dance. Yes, I’ve been to workshops all over Europe. When you live on the Continent, local groups tend to be small and because they don’t have many events, people travel a lot to balls and workshops. From Zurich I used to go to
Germany quite often. It’s the only opportunity you get to dance to live music and meet some of the better-known teachers from Scotland.
Am I right that SCD appeals to younger people in Europe? I think that is true in Germany and France, but in Switzerland the groups have been going for longer, having grown out of church social groups, but, having said that, the Lausanne group now has younger people too.
What is the appeal of SCD in Europe? It’s partly the whole Celtic/Scottish/Irish cultural thing. People see SCD as a bit exotic. Here in Scotland SCD is definitely not seen as exotic. People here are more attracted to salsa or whatever. Quite a lot of the younger people dancing in the Scottish universities are not actually Scottish. They are often Europeans over here for a year. They then go back home and get involved in SCD groups in their own country. Some are English language teachers who come over here for a year, then take dancing back to their classes at home. Today in Poland you can see new groups starting up in the same way as the German groups
