We were out all day yesterday at the Boston Celtic Music Festival (
BCMFest) which was a blast. It's not a "how many fancy musicians can we pay to come to Boston in the middle of winter" event, it's a "good lord there are a ton of excellent musicians who live in Boston" event. It was great to go out and see the locals and say 'hello again', as I haven't really been out playing since before Christmas. Also, since it's "Celtic" that means a lot of people I know from Scottish dance stuff (country dancers, highland dancers, musicians) as well as a lot of people I know from Irish sessions, and a fortuitous drop-in by the fantastic
Nic Gareiss who I used to know back in the day when he was a cute little high schooler, and now he's touring the world and - miraculously - still delighted to see me when I turn up in the audience... perhaps because he knew me when I was in a band and therefore super-cool (for mid-Michigan), and he's kind enough to still think I'm cool... but more likely because he's just an enthusiastically nice and friendly guy.
The concert portion had a lot of dance performance - they went from Scottish (highland = slipper-shoe, lots of hoppy skippy pointed toes, vaguely balletic, very careful-looking) to Irish (hard-shoe step-dance = rigid posture, high-kicks, clicky heels and toes, adjective I'd use would be precise) to Cape Breton (hard-sole shoes, stompy/clicky, style tends to be very cute, I think because of the ankle-flexing), to clogging (American, more free-form improvisational, relaxed posture, and comapred to other forms, a bit all-over-the-place). It was fascinating to watch the progressive "loosening-up" of the dance form, and I came to the conclusion that straight-up Scottish or Irish step just doesn't seem like as much fun to do as the more relaxed styles. One thing they didn't have demoed was Irish sean-nos style, which is the improv fire-side "session dancing" form of Irish - I think that would go on my list of "looks like fun". American dance kind of subdivides into regional styles, including shuffle clogging, heel-and-toe buckdance, low-to-the-floor flatfoot - but the dancers I tend to admire are the ones who've learned a bunch of all that and just use what they want to use to go with the tunes they're hearing.
Let's see, I should find some videos for the curious:
traditional highland,
competition Irish step,
performance Irish step,
Irish sean-nos,
Cape Breton (
also),
clogging -
(performance,
nic,
sampler)
Anyway. The festival yesterday was kind of an inspiration to consider maybe dancing again someday, and definitely to play more. Except today it's 6 inches of snow and maybe I'm not going anywhere... and so, the excuses begin.