skerryvore

On Friday evening I went with some friends to see Skerryvore (who were preceded by an excellent group of young people – think there must of been about 30 of them on stage) at Barvas Community Centre.
It was a brilliant evening (if slightly warm in the hall!), but one of the things that my friend and I spent the evening commenting on was how you would never-ever see an event like this in England.

Now I am lucky as I am half Scottish and was bought up to enjoy a good ceilidh and know some Scottish dances (there is nothing like a good strip the willow for a good laugh and exercise!) – I even won competitions with a local Scottish Dancing club which I loved. And I know in England we have the good old barn dance which is usually a good laugh but somehow it is different here, really different.

The first noticeable difference is the spread in age at these type of events. Due to the nature of the event it wasn’t really a family event (under 18’s had to be accompanied) – so the youngest there were in their early teens, but there were people there right through the ages to ‘older people’ and everyone  seem to rub along together very nicely.

The second thing that I really notice is that EVERYONE seems to know the dances and wants to dance. It seems children and young people are taught these dances at school and ceilidhs are part of the fabric of life here. But even the ‘coolest’ young people, who in the same situation in England would be sat in a corner hiding, are up dancing. There is no ‘calling’ of the dances – as there would be at a barn dance or a ceilidh in England – but everyone seems to know what they are doing and seems to love doing it! No embarrassment – the pipes, fiddle and accordion draws the first cords of the tune and they are off.
There is a downside to this – if you don’t know the dance at the first cord you might feel you can’t join in and if you don’t know Scottish dances you might never feel able to join in – though last night it did feel even the novice dancer could have been on that dance floor!

The third thing was how people danced in general! Skerryvore didn’t just play Scottish dance music, they did a wide range of covers with a  bit of a Scottish twist and so the dance floor remained packed but again how people were dancing was very different to a comparable situation in England. People tended to dance in pairs, and in fairly ‘traditional’ ways – in a ballroom dance hold.

None of this is criticism it is merely observation, and in fact the sense of community is one of the reasons I wanted to move to a rural community. I also don’t want to over romanticise it all either, the issues that are faced with alcohol here are widely known  but that is not what this blog is about so we will pass over it!

Another hilarious observation was that on one particularly wild and overly packed rendition of strip-the-willow, two lads had paired up (this is very unusual) and the man who was on the ‘women’s’ side of the set was routinely ignored much to his annoyance. It is perfectly acceptable for females to be the male partner in the dances – in fact I made a new friend last night through this very type of pairing last night.