by Pat McNees

See links to specific dances and dance groups below

Folk dancing is so big in the Capital area that you can go out and hit the boards every night of the month — and still miss a lot of the action.

Many folks looking for an alternative to jogging or exercise class are turning to the more than 90 local folk dance groups, classes, and regularly scheduled dances. But why dancing?

"Folk dancing keeps things on a human plane," says Julie O'Reagan, who works in TV production and favors Scottish country dancing and American contras. [Many of the people quoted have probably moved on to new jobs.] "Part of the etiquette of contra dancing is the eye contact, so it's in the nature of the dancing that you get involved quickly. But ... you don't come to pair off, you come to dance."

More testimony: "I like it for the sheer joy of the movement," says a legal researcher who keeps her after-hours folk dancing a secret from her daytime colleagues because she doesn't want the two worlds to mingle.

"It's great for business travel," says statistician Dan Siegel. "You get to a new town, call someone from the folk dance network, and spend the evening dancing. There's no other social activity in which you touch someone the same evening you meet them." Rob Theodore, a general contractor, agrees: "Where else can you spend $4 and put your hands on a hundred women?" [Rob got in a lot of trouble with this comment.]

While there is some flirting, attorney Suzanne Caldwell sees folk dancing a little more innocently: "It's like the way I knew people when I was in fifth grade, not knowing anything else about them except how they expressed themselves in the dancing. You don't even know what most of them do for a living."

Most folk dance halls are filled with people whose dance-phobic partners are home watching television, and even at "couples dances" the general practice is to keep changing partners, which means you don't have to bring one along to have a good time. And at an average door price around $5 an evening, (sometimes more, with live music), most devotees think folk dancing is a bargain — and an exceptional health value. Stan Fowler, the Park Service ranger at Glen Echo Park, gave up marathon running for the dance floor. "On a good night folk dancing is just as aerobic," he says.

Why, then, do so many people who hear of the opportunities for folk dancing nearby respond with surprise or indifference? Probably a lot of them avoid dancing because of traumatic box-step experiences in junior high, rainy-day classes in the multipurpose room or gymnasium that left them feeling klutzy and socially incompetent, if not downright hostile.

On the other hand, if you've imagined yourself leading a line of Greek dancers or clogging away to a feverish fiddle, here are some steps you can take.

If you yearn to dance like the peasants in "Fiddler on the Roof," international folk dancing — which is mainly European — may be where to start. Line dances (popularized by Anthony Quinn as "Zorba the Greek" and Melina Mercouri in "Never on Sunday") and circle dances (the most famous of which is the hora) offer lots of fun and distinct advantages. They require no partners, and people with different skill levels can dance together, the weaker dancers copying the stronger dancers.

On the difficult numbers, including the wonderfully assertive Romanian and Bulgarian dances (which make you feel like advance troops in a joyful revolution), beginners watch first and then simply dance "behind the line," imitating the movements of the veteran dancers.

Balkan music and rhythms may sound strange initially, and as Stephen Sklarow, a former biochemist with a degree in Macedonian dance who teaches folk dancing at George Washington University, puts it, "Your feet may not do what your ears hear at first." But it's easy to get hooked on this music, and there's a nice kind of group energy to the dancing. It's what the noted Israeli dancer Moshiko described as "nation-building" music.

Couples dancing is another option that comes in many ethnic flavors. As you move west in European footwork, you see an evolution of cooperation between male and female dancers, explains Sklarow. "Men and women never dance together in traditional Turkey, for example. As you travel farther west, you'll find men and women dancing together, but doing different steps, often with the women standing around while the men do show-off steps. The Scandinavian dances are the most evolved of the couples dances, requiring great rapport; you not only have to learn your own step, but have to cooperate as a couple."

Scandinavian couples' turning dances are difficult to learn but are far more interesting than their cousins, the ballroom dances taught in commercial studios.
Some dancers work toward the highly coordinated couples dancing by starting with the social dancing of the British Isles, either the elegant relatives of American folk dancing (English and Scottish country dancing) or the more robust Irish ceili (pronounced KAY-lee) and set dances. And others start with something closer to home: plain old American folk dancing, which can prove to be anything but plain. The main American dances are the familiar four-couples-in-a-set square dances and the locally more popular contra dances, in which rows of couples swing and twirl their way up and down long sets like something out of "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers."

By far the most popular dance ticket in the Capital area, and one of the biggest dances in the country, is the Friday night dance held in the Spanish Ballroom at Glen Echo Park. These dances are faster, more vigorous and less cornpone than those you may remember from elementary school. Yet they're relatively easy to master, and most of the square and contra dances offer instruction for beginners before the regular dance begins.

Incidentally, there's a huge difference between Eastern (or New England) "folk" squares and contras, and "Western" squares. "Western" square dancing started 50 years ago, when a gent named Pappy Shaw in Denver (hence, "Western") decided square dancing wasn't challenging enough and created an intricate, fast-moving style in which all four couples were doing something simultaneously. To get into a Western dance club, you have to take about 30 lessons to master a basic structure of 72 commands ("right and left through," "grand right and left," etc.). Then, as you move on to more advanced calls like "rotary spin," you graduate from basic to mainstream, advanced and challenge clubs. Emphasis is on precision dancing, mostly to recorded music.

"We kind of look down our nose at the square dancing over at Glen Echo," says Norm Jackson, historian of the Washington Area Square Dancers Cooperative Association (WASCA boasts 172 member clubs). "It's totally open to the public, and they don't meet the criteria for being a member of WASCA."

Not only is everyone welcome at Glen Echo, but you used to occasionally find one or two stray dogs on the dance floor (not in the ballroom’s elegant new state).

Callers introduce most dances with a walk-through explanation, so that even beginners can participate without hours of lessons. Many people arrive singly instead of as couples, you never see men and women in matching outfits, and you're lucky if the fans work in the summer. Yet the parking lot and dance floor are jampacked on a Friday night.

But American folk dancers do seem to be snobbish about their music: It must be live, not canned. And the nation's capital is one of the best areas in the country for string band music.

One common characteristic of all folk dances: Because they're handed down from generation to generation, they tend to be structured-and, therefore, learnable. Many beginners probably agree with what WASCA's Norm Jackson says about square dancing: It appeals to people who are uncomfortable with what he calls free-form dancing (you know, "Waltz a little faster, it's a rhumba") and want a formula to follow.

"While you're dancing, your mind is totally focused on what the caller is telling you to do, and you're blocking out everything else," says Jackson. "But it's a joyful atmosphere, and everyone is having fun. It just removes all your trouble and woes."

Originally published fifteen years ago in the Washington Post as “Folk Dancing's Leaps & Bounds — Every Night, There's Action.” Pat wrote several such articles for the Post, gradually gathering them in Dancing: A Guide to the Capital Area. Copyright (c) by Pat McNees. For permission to reprint, contact the author (click here).

I buy my dance shoes at Repeat Performance, on Nicholson Lane, in Rockville, MD.

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LINKS TO FOLK DANCES IN THE CAPITAL AREA

Diamond Dance Circle (The International Folk Dancers of Bethesda).

Folk Dancing (classes and sessions) in Maryland, listings maintained by the Folk Dance Association. Key folk dancing sponsors and venues are missing.