CeilidhKids - now aged eight and a half Caroline Brockbank In Issue No. 8 Caroline Brockbank wrote about her project to introduce her own children, then aged 4 and nearly 3 to family-centred ceilidh dancing. I asked Caroline, now that her children are older, how the enterprise was progressing and discovered that the original members have graduated from CeilidhKids but been replaced by a new ‘generation’ of dancers. It has also expanded and CeilidhKids Glasgow is up and running. As Norah Dunn, whose obituary appears on page 29 put it, “Catch ‘em Young” [Editor] My children are indeed older. I began CeilidhKids as a six week project for them and their friends when they were aged four and nearly three. Now my daughter is at high school, shortly to be joined by her brother and CeilidhKids is a full time job. When I reread the original article, written after we had been going for only two and a half years, I was surprised to find that the basic premise is almost the same after all these years and whilst the idea has expanded, it has deviated very little from the original concept. To recap, CeilidhKids provides ‘Scottish dancing for children and families in the Edinburgh area’. In fact I concentrate mostly on pre-school children and those slightly older, as the Society (among others) does an excellent job for 7 year olds upwards. Children aged 3-5 year old need an adult to partner and guide them, as very young children cannot follow instructions quickly enough - one adult needs to be able to dance with two children, sometimes with a baby strapped in a baby carrier on the front, so dances need to allow for this. The success of a dance must never rely on anyone being in the right place at the right time, as little ones lose interest, wander off, or have their own ideas about how a dance should go. Most of our dances are adapted from the standard ceilidh / SCD repertoire (Gay Gordons, Flying Scotsman, Swedish Masquerade). Some can be done almost exactly as written (Prince of Orange), and some we have written ourselves, such as the Birthday Circle. However, I was amused to see ‘Jenni’s Roundabout Dance’ which we wrote ourselves in the first year, reproduced almost exactly
CeilidhKids celebrates its 5th birthday
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The Reid family dance ‘en famille’
in ‘Jigs and Reels’ as ‘Happy Hoops’ – great minds think alike! The original members of the group outgrew the family classes years ago. Recently, however, some of my ‘graduates’ have joined the Edinburgh Branch Children’s class and it is lovely to see their skills developing. I have started running an annual New Year school-age family ceilidh to try and bring the graduate families together at least on an occasional basis. It’s also wonderful to get feedback from parents who have been to weddings and have been surprised and delighted to find how confident their children are on the dance floor, having learned the basic concepts at our classes.
