Dances of the Ballroom

Discovering the dances of the ballroom and dancehall….

We’ve had a lovely dance journey here at Fly Right – starting with modern jive, then swing dance, a long dalliance with ballroom dance, some tango…. and our desire to keep researching social dance history has led us down different dance paths along the way.  We have been lucky that we’ve been able to work and train with some of the best exponents of our favourite dance styles. Whilst researching Ragtime dances for our new show, we went to work in Paris for a week of workshops with some dance historians – the programme covered the era in which we were interested, but also included extensive training in original 19th century waltz, polka and mazurka styles, along with some complicated quadrilles.  Suddenly, we were hooked!

Since then, company members have travelled to Germany and back to Paris to extend and consolidate their skills – there is little training or activity in the UK, so travel abroad was necessary to get the calibre of input from dance historians that we need. We have been approached by a French vintage dance and history organisation who are keen to run an international dance event in Scotland in 2014 – a programme of workshops over a few days, culminating in a costumed ball at a location of historical significance (anyone got a ballroom in a Scottish castle where they’d like to run a 19th-century-themed ball?!).

But first, we need to build a scene for this dance style – and we’ve made a start!  Dancebase employed us to deliver a dance workshop on 3 February 2013 as a taster for this style of dance – the 21 people who attended seemed to have enormous fun, and many expressed a desire to continue learning and help develop a scene to build up to the event in 2014.

We’ve also made contact with a group in Edinburgh – Les Danses Antiques = who have just started to run classes every second Sunday – you can find out more about them from their Facebook page – Les Danses Antiques (they don’t have a website yet).

We are also planning our own day of workshops very soon, so watch this space if you want to get involved.  And please let us know if you want to get involved or find out more about our planned international event in 2014 by emailing us – mail@flyrightdanceco.com .