1st, 3rd, 5th Thursdays in Somerville!
Feb. 7th, 2025 01:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sorcyressOKAY!
Dance was _very_ good tonight! We wound up with six of us, but just the right six that I could be pretty goofy with what we did! This means we did two certified bangers (Minister on the Loch and De'il Amang the Tailors), at least one dance that I will probably never do again because _what_ (Nineteenth of December) and a couple of nice surprises (Flower of Glasgow was pretty solid! Hall of the South has one kinda keen figure but some horrible transitions. Ha! Ha! The wooin' o' it was a pretty great beginner dance to practice some footwork transitions).
The energy was delicious and people were willing to get into their goofiness with me. I don't know that it was as well planned an evening as usual, and attendance was on the lighter side, but that's "despite the snow" and I'm still very very happy with the whole situation.
My dance class is making me _so_ fucking happy y'all. Every single week I run it, I encounter more of the "oh god I need to advertise and invite people and throw together the reminder email and the facebook event aaaaah" and then the "fuck fuck, what do you mean I have to _plan_ and find bunches of dances to do and have some backups in case I don't have very many couples?!" and you would think that this would all be Too Stressful (tm), and it kinda is...
...but then I get to class. I stand in a room chockablock filled with books, bookshelves on every wall, and four or six or eight or ten people there to follow my goofy little instructions and practice their footwork and formations and Get Better at Scottish dancing and it's _such a good time_. I am, in some ways, treating the class very serious, because this is serious, I want this to be a real institution that lasts a long time. But I am also treating the class as something Goofy As Fuck, because _I_ am goofy, and I think Scottish is fun and can be casual and beautiful and full of flourishes and the longer we collectively do it, the better we'll all get.
I am getting excuses to try so many new dances, and at least see them but in really good weeks like this, dance them as well as the rest! Picking themes and exploring figures and seeing what I can get to tumble out of the SCDdb and working out my teaching and then just everyone moving and seeming to have a nice time, a collection of people --some strangers even!-- believing in my weird little idea of "maybe it is sustainable to have a queer Scottish dance class".
(Officially it is the "gender free SCD" class, which I do like because it rhymes. But in my heart I call it "queer Scottish" because that is in some ways my bigger goal, that I want a class that feels not just gender-sexuality-modern-identity-queer, but is a more classical attempt to take the norm and fuzz the edges until it is something softer, kinder, weirder, better. I am queering Scottish every time I say "the rules are only so immutable, we are here to mute them in ways that make things better for all of us".)
Community is good (their heart sings) and the fact that I am finding and making and living this one fills me with so much pride and joy and energy.
~Sor
MOOP!
Dance was _very_ good tonight! We wound up with six of us, but just the right six that I could be pretty goofy with what we did! This means we did two certified bangers (Minister on the Loch and De'il Amang the Tailors), at least one dance that I will probably never do again because _what_ (Nineteenth of December) and a couple of nice surprises (Flower of Glasgow was pretty solid! Hall of the South has one kinda keen figure but some horrible transitions. Ha! Ha! The wooin' o' it was a pretty great beginner dance to practice some footwork transitions).
The energy was delicious and people were willing to get into their goofiness with me. I don't know that it was as well planned an evening as usual, and attendance was on the lighter side, but that's "despite the snow" and I'm still very very happy with the whole situation.
My dance class is making me _so_ fucking happy y'all. Every single week I run it, I encounter more of the "oh god I need to advertise and invite people and throw together the reminder email and the facebook event aaaaah" and then the "fuck fuck, what do you mean I have to _plan_ and find bunches of dances to do and have some backups in case I don't have very many couples?!" and you would think that this would all be Too Stressful (tm), and it kinda is...
...but then I get to class. I stand in a room chockablock filled with books, bookshelves on every wall, and four or six or eight or ten people there to follow my goofy little instructions and practice their footwork and formations and Get Better at Scottish dancing and it's _such a good time_. I am, in some ways, treating the class very serious, because this is serious, I want this to be a real institution that lasts a long time. But I am also treating the class as something Goofy As Fuck, because _I_ am goofy, and I think Scottish is fun and can be casual and beautiful and full of flourishes and the longer we collectively do it, the better we'll all get.
I am getting excuses to try so many new dances, and at least see them but in really good weeks like this, dance them as well as the rest! Picking themes and exploring figures and seeing what I can get to tumble out of the SCDdb and working out my teaching and then just everyone moving and seeming to have a nice time, a collection of people --some strangers even!-- believing in my weird little idea of "maybe it is sustainable to have a queer Scottish dance class".
(Officially it is the "gender free SCD" class, which I do like because it rhymes. But in my heart I call it "queer Scottish" because that is in some ways my bigger goal, that I want a class that feels not just gender-sexuality-modern-identity-queer, but is a more classical attempt to take the norm and fuzz the edges until it is something softer, kinder, weirder, better. I am queering Scottish every time I say "the rules are only so immutable, we are here to mute them in ways that make things better for all of us".)
Community is good (their heart sings) and the fact that I am finding and making and living this one fills me with so much pride and joy and energy.
~Sor
MOOP!
no subject
on 2025-02-10 04:59 pm (UTC)