The darting beauty, eyes bright with accusation, stopped a stranger cold on the steps of Park Hill Presbyterian Church’s Steen Recreation Hall.
“This is Scottish dancing,” she cried, warding off the visitor with an accusing, upheld finger. “We are going to Scottish dancing.”
Middle-aged, two feet taller than the vivid child, the stranger froze, disconcerted. “How can she tell that I’m not a Scottish dancer ?”
Six-year-old Whitney Bertholic didn’t wait around to say. She wasn’t trying to block the entrance to this North Little Rock church hall. She was just very, very excited about her fifth lesson with the Arkansas Scottish Country Dance Society’s new children’s class.
She bounded by, all but dragging her father through glass doors and a hug by one teacher, Bernadette Rieger, and onto a glossy wooden floor where another teacher, Judy Robertson, waited in a long dancing skirt, gathering to her other excited little girls.
One, two, three... eventually Miss Bernadette and Miss Judy were surrounded by eight young and younger lasses, ages 11 to 5, most slightly less electrified than Whitney but all as eager as a box of kittens.
What sort of dancing were the girls so keen to learn ?
It looked, from the sidelines, a little like square dancing — and a little like a box of kittens.
“No, they’re picking it up real easy,” Matt Bertholic said, watching his daughter proudly. “It isn’t all that hard.” A few collisions aside, of course.
Robertson and Rieger said the children’s instruction is tailored to short attention spans, so everyone goes home with a sense of accomplishment. Yet the girls learn the same basics adults must master.
Studious Makayla Smith, a 5-year-old from North Little Rock, eagerly explained that she’d been doing Scottish dance “last Monday and this Monday.
“ I remember three things,” she said, lifting cupped hands and rising to the balls of her tiny feet. “This —” (she extended her right foot with the toe quite pointy ). “This —” (quick hops shifting her weight from foot to foot ).
“And this —” a slip-step sideways away from her (adamantly non-dancing ) Uncle Patrick Smith and then back.
Each children’s lesson begins with a review of the last week’s concepts and ends with a valedictory huddle in which Rieger hands out a worksheet with a map of Scotland to color or a page of words like “bairn” and “haggis” to match with definitions. The girls gobble up these tidbits. The first time she heard the word haggis, 7-year-old Halo Skinner thought it might mean “grandmother.” Now she knows it doesn’t mean that.
The children’s beginner class (Rieger occasionally slips and calls them “the babies” ) is only 30 minutes of what goes on from 6: 30 to 9: 15 p. m. Mondays. Most of the night is spent instructing 20 or more adult students, who range from two teenage girls to men and women in their 40 s through 60 s.
Dress is casual, but everyone wears ballet slippers, ghillies or soft-soled shoes. Laughter abounds but progress is businesslike. Students tend to be smartjob people: engineers, mathematicians, neurologists. They come from all around central Arkansas; three Arkansas Tech University professors drive from Russellville. They talk about their ancestry. They don’t talk about how easy it all is. “There’s a lot to absorb,” Craig Corder, a civil engineer, explained. It took him “about two more years from now,” he said, to begin to feel competent. Edith Miller, who first learned this dancing as a child in Scotland, attends with her husband, John. After three years with this society, she said, “some of it is coming back to me from when I was a kid.” Corder added, “I have trouble remembering the footwork, the patterns, the staying in time to music. I find it challenging.” Is that why he does it ? “Partly, and partly for the exercise. It’s good exercise.”
FAST BUT NOT FURIOUS The Scottish are said to be gory warriors; their minor-key anthems moan of bloody awfulness. And that haggis stuff is an innard pudding baked in the stomach of a sheep.
But “this is the ballroom dancing of Scotland,” Robertson stressed. Ballrooms are bright, beautiful places where welldressed people put on their best behavior.
Forget anything you might recall from high school poetry class about drunken Tam O’Shanter. Especially forget the great Scot bard Robert Burns’ immortal lines, “They reel’d, they set, they cross’d, they cleekit, Till ilka carlin swat and reekit, And coost her duddies to the wark, And linkit at it in her sark !” Scottish country dance is nothing whatsoever like witches capering until rank sweat soaks their clothes and so they disrobe and go on doing fancy footwork in place (setting ) in their underwear, reeling and crossing and whatever cleekit means.
Scottish country dance can leave a group of healthy men and women sweaty and breathless, but it’s the breathless sweat of refinement.
Much of the exertion takes place at toe level. The ballrooms of Scotland share old influences with French ballet, Robertson said, so dancers hop about on the balls of their feet, and they use out-turning ballet foot positions. Scottish dancers also must master different footwork for each kind of music they dance to.
On Oct. 13 and 20, adult students sweated over the pas de basque step, which involves prancing from side to side and goes with reels, jigs and hornpipes. “It’s usually a setting step,” Robertson said, explaining that “setting means that you are not traveling, you’re doing something on the spot. You can also use the pas de basque for travel but it is a setting step, generally.”
Students also learn the skip change of step (“ of” being part of the name ) for traveling about during reels, jigs and hornpipes.
“The slip-step is generally used for circles,” Robertson said. “And then the strathspey step is unique to Scottish country dancing. ‘Strath’ means valley and ‘spey’ refers to the river Spey, so that step originated in the valley of the river Spey in Scotland. The skip change of step begins with a hop in the air; the strathspey begins with a sink. It’s a strong, powerful step.”
GOT ALL THAT ? You also have to learn to set in strathspey time, so there’s another bit of footwork for that. “There are also other steps but they’re not basic ones,” she said, “so we don’t spend a lot of time on them in the beginners classes.” Given enough practice, Robertson said, “the footwork becomes second nature; you don’t have to think about it.” Students learn dances that are hundreds of years old, like The Prince of Orange and Petronella. But even as you read these words choreographers go on cranking out new ones for use by societies from North Little Rock to Japan. “There are literally thousands of dances,” Robertson said. “So what we teach is the dancing.
“ Any dance is composed of pretty much basic formations in eight-bar phrases: down the middle and up, turn by the right, turn by the left, right hands across, left hands back [and so forth ]. A lot of the dances are 32-bar dances; that’s four eight-bar phrases. So if you know how to do ‘rights and lefts,’ if you know how to do ‘down the middle and up,’ if you know the allemande, then it doesn’t make any difference what the dance is.”
Someone at a ball will “read” the dance aloud, reciting its choreography before assembled dancers. After that, there’s no caller. You and your memory, and your partners and their memories, are on your own.
WAIT — THERE’S MORE Scottish gets couples with good posture hopping and gliding in circles or dashing at each other from opposing lines, feet pattering away like raindrops. Then comes the tricky part: mandatory eye contact. “We try to teach them not to look at the floor,” longtime dancer Pat Pennington said. “The floor’s not going to go away. It will be there, wherever your feet land.” Good dancers flirt like crazy as they wind in and among other couples. “If you remember, 300 years ago in Scotland if you had come from your abode and hadn’t seen a lot of people all winter and you went to a dance, you’d want to make maximum use of looking at each other,” Rieger said.
You might find a husband at a dance, she said. “I did.”
She grinned in the direction of Dave Rieger, perching on the edge of the parish hall stage and patiently assisting the children’s instruction by spooling snippets of a reel from a CD player. He grinned back.
Oh gosh, aren’t there less intimidating forms of exercise ?
“The great thing about this, if you’re working really hard all day, then you come here and you can’t think about work,” said Bernadette Rieger. “You can only think about this or else you will mess up.
“ So it is a great relief, actually, to only think about what you’re dancing for the next eight bars of music.”
Dave Rieger added, “We’re not here to be perfect.” Confusion often adds to the fun.
LADS AT A LOSS ? No little boys signed up for this first children’s series — although they would have been welcome and most likely lionized. (“ Oh, good, ” one girl exclaimed when a musical passage deposited her in front of John Miller, “I like when it’s a man !” ) Corder, a civil engineer, makes the woman-to-man ratio at 4-to-1. Not such a bad thing for those men, he noted. It does add a layer of difficulty for the women, who have to learn to dance like women and like men, too. John Johnston of Maumelle, resplendent in the dark green and blue tartan of his ancestors who were, he thinks, “basically cattle thieves and ruffians,” had this advice for any man whose wife wants him to try Scottish dance: “Just give in.” His own wife “sort of drug me to these events, made me come. Now I’m just crazy about it. And she doesn’t even come any more.”
HOW TO LEARN The Arkansas Scottish Country Dance Society offers its 12-week course three times a year. Teens pay $ 20 for the series; adults pay $ 55. The children’s class costs $ 10. The next series begins in January. “I would advise [people intrigued by the sound of all this ] to begin with the first class session, because the way we teach it, everything builds,” Robertson said. “If you walk in in the middle of the 12-week series, you’ve lost a lot of ground. Unless you’re already a dancer and have some knowledge of some of the figures, it will be very difficult for you.” Graduates come back to the beginners’ sessions for years, bolstering shaky newbies but also to cement their own grasp on the basics. Helping others, Johnston sees himself as “perpetuating a tradition that goes way, way back.” “ The reason we do Scottish is that’s our heritage, it’s our ancestry, ” Robertson said.
She’s fully certified as an instructor by the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society, and Bernadette Rieger is working her way toward full certification. It takes several years.
“There’s special training and then you take exams and the examiners are from Scotland, Canada and different places,” Rieger said. “I had to pass a written exam, a dancing exam and a teaching exam just to get my preliminary certificate. To get the full at this time I’d have to submit a lesson plan, submit my two years of teaching history and then do another teaching exam in front of examiners, adults who usually play like they don’t know what they’re doing.”
So in a way, little Whitney had it exactly right. The entrance to the global Scottish ballroom is guarded by enthusiasts intent on ensuring that the merry souls inside will try to do things up right. SOUND ADVICE Scottish country dance instructor Judy Robertson has helpful advice for all those Arkansans who rumple their foreheads trying to tell a jig from a reel. “A jig is in three-quarter time, so the rhythm there is different than that of a reel, which is in four-four time,” she said. “What we tell all beginners, if you can say ‘alli-ga-tor,’ that’s a reel, that’s four-four time. Whereas a jig goes with ‘jiggity-jiggityjiggity jig.’”
— Celia Storey
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