Back to Our Roots in Glasgow

The Society began in Glasgow in 1923. Spring Fling and its sister event, Spring Fringe, are in Glasgow from Friday 20 April till Sunday 22 next year. Both events have facebook pages. Contact springfling2018.com if you are under 35 and fringeinglasgow@gmail.com if you are over 35. Leanne Benton and Sabina Lawrie are members of the team organising Spring Fling 2018 . They have been dancing for years and are part of the vibrant young dancers’ scene in the city. Joana Stausberg, one of the Bonn Weekend organisers, asked them how things are going.

When we met at the Newcastle Festival this February, I was amazed at the number of dancers who came over from Glasgow. Can you tell us a little about the Glasgow dance scene?

Newcastle was certainly an exercise in logistics! I think overall we took about 80 dancers from Glasgow. The Glasgow dance scene at the moment is really exciting. We have three main groups working together – our University group, Alba (the alumni group), and Glasgow branch. Our main focus is making SCD fun and welcoming for everyone – whether they are beginners or experienced, love social dancing or competitions. And we are bringing in lots of new, young dancers so we keep growing year after year.

How do you recruit new dancers?

We bring in dancers from all ages and stages, but our biggest intake each September is usually the Glasgow Universtity club’s beginners class – where our teachers manage something like fourteen sets of new faces each academic year. We have put a lot of energy into encouraging new beginners over the past few years, which means that as they quickly progress we move them up to our other classes too. One of our biggest strengths in Glasgow at the moment is that the three largest local groups work together. We have classes that cater to each stage and set of interests. The University group, with the support of Alba, brings in new, young dancers through Beginners and Intermediates. Together with the Branch we also run a Joint Venture Advanced class (JVA).We try to co-ordinate our events and classes to match what each group needs so that we can support each other. It’s not always easy to timetable so many things but very worth it! We are finding that having young teachers is also really important for keeping young dancers. All our working together has led to our local Branch supporting a group of dancers from JVA sitting the RSCDS teaching exams, which is fantastic news for the future of all dancing in Glasgow and beyond, and something we hope to continue to build on this year and in the future.

Sabina Lawrie and Leanne Beeton

Why did you start dancing, and what keeps you going?

Sabina: I’m motivated by sharing the joy of dancing! I think one of the main strengths of SCD is that it can be danced by lots of different people and it really has the ability to bring people together and be truly social. I particularly enjoy teaching beginners and enabling people to discover their own love of dance. Leanne: My main motivation at the moment is teaching and development. Alba and the university club run really successful mentoring and peer support structures for our teachers and we put a lot of work into making sure our classes and teachers always have a focus and feel supported. I’ve been teaching our Alba children too, which I absolutely love! Being involved in all of that makes it hard to not keep going.

Glasgow will host Spring Fling 2018 - what are you looking forward to most and what is most annoying with the preparations?

So far the hardest part has definitely been deciding how much pizza we need to order! Also – trying to get an entire committee to decide on which t-shirts to order. Who knew there were so many shades of blue? Seriously though – the biggest difficulty for Glasgow so far has been adapting how we plan to cope with a deadline so far in advance. We are used to working on the timescale of academic years – so we rarely organise logistics this far ahead. We’re all really excited about hosting Spring Fling next year. The most fun part is looking forward to so many young dancers gathering together. Our aim is to bring together all the enthusiasm and energy we have for young SCD in Glasgow at the moment and send it home with everyone who travels here to join us.

Sabina Lawrie and Leanne Beeton