#FirstFootingDance

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Shoe the Donkey, #FirstFootingDance

Greetings from my home state of Michigan where I spent this week reconnecting with friends (including my first clogging teacher Sheila Graziano), lovers, family, and performing with traditional musicians from the American Midwest at the Ann Arbor Ark! The Ark, which has been presenting folk and traditional music for over 50 years hosted their 24th annual Crossroads Céilí, a midwinter celebration of Celtic music, song, and dance. As always, this show was curated by Mick Gavin, a fiddler and melodeon-player originally from Co. Clare, Ireland who moved to Detroit in 1974 at age 28. Mick has mentored countless Michigan musicians and dancers and has been tremendously encouraging to me, sharing thoughts, history, and traditions of dancers from Ireland. I remember he once mailed me a VHS tape of Irish old style dancer Paddy Bán O'Broin when I was twelve! In 2018, the Michigan Traditional Arts Program recognized Mick with a Michigan Heritage Award for his dedication to teaching and performing traditional music in Michigan. 

I had the pleasure of performing a duet with Mr. Gavin during the concert, including the mazurka Shoe the Donkey. A popular couple's dance at Irish céilís (an Irish social dance event, similar to a Scottish ceilidh), Mick and I performed the piece as a duo. The fact that Shoe the Donkey is considered a couple’s or "social dance" also presented an interesting challenge - how to evoke the joviality, the physicality, and the specific gestures of a pas de deux with only one dancer. 

(Shoe the Donkey, www.TheSession.org)

In the first part of Shoe the Donkey traditionally, dancers execute subtle brushing steps imitating the phrasing of the tune. In performing the piece with Mick, I wanted to retain that mimetic element, using the melody as inspiration for the footwork. During the performance, I began by using the actual steps from the couple's dance, duple sets of brushes preceded by a hops, then extemporized on them, while continuing to imitate the melody percussively. In the second part of the couple's dance, pairs of dancers walk four steps with hands crossed and joined, then turn 180 degrees in tandem. I've always enjoyed the playfulness of this repeated re-orientation and wanted to pay homage to it by turning, returning, and re-turning with each phrase in the second part of the tune. I found the challenge of corporeally referencing the ways bodies turn in the traditional version of the piece to be eminently enjoyable. The 180 degree turn itself is a gesture which feels so good. Thinking about my own experience as a queer person combined with the sensation of this specific movement also reminds me of the ways that we use the term "orientation" in terms of identity, gender, and desire. There is labor, but also pleasure re-orienting repeatedly. 

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A post shared by Nic Gareiss (@nicgareisslfi) on Dec 30, 2018 at 9:07am PST

I like the idea of performing a tune typically used for partner-dance with only one dancing body - or more accurately two bodies, both of which are moving and making sound simultaneously. {After all, there's no sound without movement} In the performances in Ann Arbor this weekend, Mick Gavin and I both made sounds - and while there was no physical contact between Mr. Gavin and myself, it still felt as though we were dancing together. This reminds me of something Jazz, House, and Lindy Hop dancer LaTasha Barnes said once about solo dance: in solo dance forms, we don't touch each other but rather, we "touch the music." In my chapter in Clare Croft's book Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings, I write about this dancer+musician connection as a rapport between bodies in motion: 

Though I am the only dancer onstage and he is the only fiddler, somehow I do not feel like a soloist, but rather his dance partner ...  lifting, bearing each other’s weight, initiating sound and gesture through a reflexive, mutually-dependent process of affectual suggestion. (1)

Finally, just a quick reminder to post your First Footing dance videos, photos, and reminiscences tonight as the bells ring out for New Year! Be sure to use the hashtag #FirstFootingDance on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram!! 

First Footing is a collaboration of the Traditional Dance Forum of Scotland, University of Edinburgh Moray House School of Education, and the School of Scottish Studies with support from Creative Scotland. For engagement opportunities check out the First Footing website.

(1) Nicholas Gareiss, An Buachaill��n Bán: Reflections on one queer's performance within traditional Irish music & dance. Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings. Ed. by Clare Croft, Oxford University Press. 2017. 

[firstfootingscotland]

Dance Base, first guest artist, and LAUNCH!

I spent the beginning of this week working with Sophie Stephenson of Sophabulous Steps at Dance Base, Scotland’s national centre for dance! A fantastic step dancer with international acclaim, Sophie has a new project fusing elements of Scottish step dance, sound design, new audio technology, and musical collaboration. I felt very flattered to be invited into her development process and we spent two really enjoyable days working on her new ideas for the piece. The time felt rich. Both of us bubbled with excitement as we explored the possibility of step dance engaging fully-integrated body movement, improvising across shifting rhythmical meters found outside of traditional Scottish music, and using gesture as a means of engaging with sound - with and without audible foot rhythm. Following on from last year’s residency with Kae Sakurai of the Sound of Dance project, this is the second weeklong solo step dance development residency created through the partnership of Dance Base and the Traditional Dance Forum of Scotland. In addition to our work together, this week Sophie also worked with fellow percussive dancers Alison Carlyle and Caleb Teicher.

As I witnessed and (with a light hand+light foot) contributed to Sophie’s experimental process, I felt very grateful indeed that this kind of incredible institutional support structure exists for percussive dance in Scotland. In my experience working across many traditional dance styles, cultures, and economies, support of this magnitude for traditional dance is very rare indeed. As Susan Leigh Foster points out in the introduction of her book Worlding Dance, traditional dance so infrequently receives the same support as ballet and contemporary dance. In her words, “ethnic dances” are too often “envisioned as local rather than transcendent, traditional rather than innovative, simple rather than sophisticated, a product of the people rather than a genius.” (1) The partnership of Dance Base and the Traditional Dance Forum of Scotland departs from this reductive logic, acknowledging traditional dance as transcendent, innovative, sophisticated, and indeed possessing its own localized genius. It’s my hope that this partnership continues for many years, allowing Scottish traditional dance artists the opportunity to nurture their creative practice through the support of organizations like Dance Base!

(Caleb Teicher, Alison Carlyle, Sophie Stephenson, and me at Dance Base. Photo by Sophie Stephenson. Follow her on Facebook and Instagram)

Between sessions working with Sophie, Caleb Teicher and I spent time this week dancing in the studios of St. Leonard’s Land at the University of Edinburgh’s Moray House School of Education. I was so pleased to welcome Caleb as my first guest artist into the studios here in Edinburgh. His wondrous dancing never ceases to dazzle me and I frequently say that in addition to his movement, always a feast for the eyes, Caleb is one of my favourite dancers to listen to. Two years ago, we created a largely improvised duo show exploring the intersection of jazz and folk, social and solo dance. Though lauded for our status within our respective genres, this new 60-minute duo collaboration really allows us to cross boundaries and playfully transgress, exploring movement, song, and the idea of percussive dance. Drawing on American tap dance, jazz, Appalachian clogging, and Irish step dance, the show really feels like a festive dialogue of sound, movement, and corporeal rapport. If you’re reading this in Ireland, we have two Irish shows coming up:

Friday, 7 December (TONIGHT!) - Connolly’s of Leap, Co. Cork, Ireland, tickets here.

Saturday, 8 December - Solstice Arts Centre, Co. Meath, Ireland, tickets here.

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(Caleb Teicher and I improvising at the beautiful studio at St. Leonard’s Land, the University of Edinburgh’s Moray House School of Education)

(Caleb Teicher & Nic Gareiss. Photo by Hillary Rees)

Finally, I am so pleased to announce the official launch event of the residency: Monday, 10 December at St. Cecilia’s Hall in Edinburgh at 5pm. Join us in this beautiful space as we kick off the inaugural First Footing Dance Residency with performances by Caleb Teicher and myself, as well as other special guest artists!!

(St. Cecilia’s Hall in Edinburgh, site of the launch of First Footing Dance Residency, Monday, 10 December at 5 pm)

(1) Susan Leigh Foster (2009) “Worlding Dance - An Introduction” in Worlding Dance, ed. S. Leigh Foster, p. 1-13.

[firstfootingscotland]

Research & Development, #FirstFootingDance

(Experimenting with vintage projectors {of which there are no fewer than 10!!} in my office at St. Leonard's Land at the University of Edinburgh. Photo by Caleb Teicher)

Exams were in full swing at the University of Edinburgh's St. Leonard's Land studios so I spent this week visiting the School of Scottish Studies archives and working in the Pleasance dance studios. After my first few hours touring the School of Scottish Studies with the generous guidance of Dr. Cathlin MacAuley, I found myself awed indeed by the wealth of information preserved across the collections. I get the sense that not even seven lifetimes, let alone the remaining seven months of my time in Edinburgh, would be enough to revel in the recordings, documents, photographs, and other media archived there. I'll be updating you as I delve into the rich resources in these archives!

In the mornings each day this week I spent time at the Pleasance dance studio working on technique, engaging new musical repertoire, and developing new sounds+new gestures. Of particular pertinence was a list of tunes shared with me by friend and piper Fergus Much who remembers First Footing for his friends and relations. His grandmother, a highland dancer, would frequently request Whistle O'er the Lave O't or Devil in the Kitchen during his First Footing visits. (According to her, Fergus is also tall, dark, and handsome) 

I wanted to familiarize myself with these melodies to see how their contours felt in my body. Both of these musical pieces have an association with highland dancing, but I wanted to engage the tunes in a percussive way, meeting the melody in the world of sound. This impulse to trace the phrases sonically, matching ornamentation note for note is inspired in part by Frank Rhodes' Appendix to Joan & Tom Flett's 1964 book Traditional Dancing in Scotland. Rhodes describes step dance as percussive footwork phrases "joined together as the dancer pleased in order to match as far as possible the notes of the music. (1, 272) Later, he describes how dancers endeavour to "follow the tune quite closely." (1, 284) Taking a nod from this historical source, I'm interested in re-imagining a step dancing body's encounter with this music as one that internalizes melodies and re-articulates them. Or as my step dance teacher Colin Dunne would say, to "make some music with the music." (2)

Alasdair Fraser's version of The Devil in the Kitchen from his record The Driven Bow with Jodi Stecher provided both inspiration and challenge as I worked to imitate the bowing and ornamentation of his masterful recorded performance. Nests of triplets, extremely subtle alternations of duple and big triplet feel, and idiomatically snapped bowing at first mystified, and eventually titillated my feet as I tried to get inside this tune. There's certainly more work to be done here on my part. My hope is that acquainting myself with the specific traditional music repertoire used for the custom of First Foot will ultimately inform my own engagement with this rich tradition which is still new to me.

This week we also launched our #FirstFootingDance social media campaign! As the year draws to a close and you venture out to visit those you love, we hope you will post videos or photos of your 2020 First Footings or share reminiscences of past years. To collate all these First Foots, use the hashtag #FirstFootingDance on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Here's my version of a #FirstFootingDance!

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A post shared by Nic Gareiss (@nicgareisslfi) on Dec 18, 2018 at 3:39am PST

First Footing is a collaboration of the Traditional Dance Forum of Scotland, University of Edinburgh Moray House School of Education, and the School of Scottish Studies with support from Creative Scotland. For engagement opportunities check out the First Footing website.

(1) Joan and Tom Flett (1964) Traditional Dancing in Scotland.

(2) Quoted from Colin Dunne's beautiful show Concert which exhibits Colin's gestural+musical encounter with Dublin fiddler Tommie Potts.