by Andy Bettis
For many years now there has been an Easter Gathering in Britain, a chance for established and 'emerging' teachers and musicians to get together for a long weekend (the Friday and Monday are public holidays here) of dancing, playing and just hanging out together. This year was my fifth time and this is my own personal record of what went on, a set of memories and recollections rather that an official report.
I'd not gone to the Gathering last year for various reasons, the main one being 'The Tyranny of the Tape'. It had become the tradition for each teacher to bring one dance to share and, to make it easier to 'take away' and remember dances, we each sent in a tape copy of our music along with a set of step notes in advance, to be copied and collated ready for our arrival. This had built up to the point that two 60-minute tapes and a hefty sheaf of papers were required to fit them all on. Halfway through the final day we were still learning new dances and had hardly done any of them more than once. In addition many of the participants, perhaps fearing being 'corrected' while teaching to their peers, seemed to take the 'safe' option of sharing one of their own choreographies, something that they couldn't go 'wrong' with. The result was a seemingly unending procession of variations on 'grapevine, sway, sway, turn', lots of which had obviously been put together just for the Gathering and had barely made it to 'works in progress'. I exaggerate for comic effect, but you get my drift. Perhaps the final straw was seeing somebody teaching his own choreography while holding his own step notes up in front of his face! No, it had gone too far and when the next Easter came around I decided to stay at home.
After a year away I thought I'd give it another go; it would be nice to dance with Laura without having to do lots of teaching, if I stayed at home I'd probably just stay in and catch up on chores, and the Easter festival still has a lot of magic for me - a time of death, birth and emergence, tied to an arcane and inexplicable dating method rather than a fixed astronomical event. Plus there was a new team in charge with new ideas about structure and layout; facilitators for the shared dance sessions, opportunities for people to lead short workshops rather than just one dance, more than one workshop going on at the same time, etc. etc. With fingers crossed we sent off a joint deposit.
The venue for the past four (or so) years has been a boarding school in the little village of Abbots Bromley, Staffordshire - fairly central for most of England and Wales if a little far from Scotland. The building itself is a rambling complex in red brick with long, echoing corridors, mostly lined with examples of the pupils' artistic creations (the staring faces and twisted bodies seemed to indicate that they didn't think they were having the best years of their lives). The forty-odd of us seemed to be rattling around in this oversized building and it was always a long walk wherever we needed to get - to the assembly hall for dancing, to the common room for the essential cuppa and chat, to the dining hall where our three valiant cooks provided vegetarian meals from the unpredictable school kitchen, and back to the widely-scattered bedrooms. It was unusual to meet anybody in these institutional corridors and as the dance hall and music rehearsal room were so far from the other rooms it was very easy to imagine myself alone in an abandoned building.
Laura and I set off early on Friday morning, avoiding what we later learned was a plague of traffic on the previous day. The drive took around two and a half hours, mostly on thinly-filled motorways but ending up with an interesting tour on some tiny country lanes. I love the idea of passing through 'transition' zones on a journey and this had all the hallmarks of a different reality; a half-hidden signpost, strange junctions (we crossed one where five roads just met with no signs or road markings), odd buildings (a huge church in the middle of nowhere), and unexpected fellow travellers, in this case a large, black-clad motorcyclist who suddenly appeared and roared past us. Eventually our destination came into view and we drove into the village on (what else?) a road that we'd never used before.
The Gathering starts on the Thursday afternoon, but as our regular group meets on Thursdays and Easter is an important time for us 'at home' we always end up arriving on Friday and missing the welcome and logistical details. This time we found an introductory letter for us in the foyer with a timetable of events, seeing that dancing began at 10:00 we had a quick cuppa, found what we thought was our bedroom and dumped our stuff in it (we were wrong and had to move it later), had a wash and brush up and headed up to the hall.
Each of the three full days had the same overall format. After breakfast there was a 45-minute singing session, followed by fifteen minutes for warming up and stretching which led into the main dance period of the day, an hour and a half of 'Shared Circle Dancing'. After the morning tea break came an hour-long workshop and then we were all off for lunch. The afternoon was taken up with three more short workshops, while a musicians' session took place for part of the time in another room (leading to some agonised choices for some). Finally, after the evening meal we had another shared session, often accompanied by live music, and from then on dancing , singing and music making went on for as long as people stayed awake.
'Shared Circle Dancing' was a description vague enough to be almost anything. As it turned out this was a very pleasant contrast to my memories of previous years, there was a facilitator with a list of dances and when we had learned and danced one she would move us on to the next teacher and the next dance. Not only that but some effort had been put into giving the session some structure, to try and avoid jarring changes and maintain some flow between dances. This was not totally successful (in most cases the facilitator didn't know the dances and had to rely on descriptions like 'easy', 'traditional', or 'meditative-ish') but overall it worked pretty well.
So how did these facilitators decide which dances to do? In previous years there had been a large piece of paper stuck on the wall in the main dance space for requests - people would write the name of a dance they'd like to learn or (more often) review and somebody who was willing to teach it would write their own name against it. This system was still used but another list was added, for people to write up the name of a dance they'd like to share with the group, along with a (very) short description of what the dance was like. Each 'shared' session had a different facilitator who would choose a program of dances from the lists and let the teachers know in advance, so they could line up tapes or CDs and be ready to teach when called upon. A third list showed all the dances we had done, from the shared sessions, workshops and impromptu get-togethers. People initialled their favourites from this list and a 'greatest hits' tape was produced afterwards, for those who wanted it.
The hour-long workshops were another of the new ideas for this year. In addition to specific dances teachers could offer to lead workshops, enabling them to work with a sequence of dances, go more deeply into one or two dances, develop a particular theme, stay within a regional style, or do whatever else they wanted. This was (for me at least) one of the best innovations to come from this years gathering, to see how other teachers worked with the group beyond teaching a single dance was both interesting and richly rewarding. Like the use of facilitators for the shared dancing sessions (but to a much greater degree) having somebody leading the group through the transitions between dances and working with the energy flow made the dancing much less draining than in previous years.
There was a wide variety of workshop themes chosen, reflecting perhaps how wide an umbrella 'Sacred/Circle Dance' has become.
As a 'lapsed' musician I didn't go to any of the music sessions, although I did enjoy dancing to the results in the evenings. There were quite a variety of instruments being played this year, from the familiar to the exotic, and they were creatively assembled in various combinations for the different pieces of music. It was nice to have different people playing on different songs rather than seeing a permanent split between 'dancers' and 'band', and to see each of the musicians contributing to the overall sound rather than just playing along in the background. Mandy de Winter, Rob Cosnett and Bob Minney seemed to be the core music group and played on most (all?) of the pieces, but without overpowering the other musicians. In fact the only small complaint I had about the live music was when the chorus was so large that there were only just enough dancers left over to form a circle around them.
Other thoughts? The food was good but still a bit heavy for a dancing weekend. The hall lighting was not very good for dancing in the evening, with all of the illumination on the outside I often found myself dancing with near-silhouettes on the opposite side of the circle. Perhaps as a result of the better use of our time together there was much less sitting around chatting and gossiping over a cuppa, a worthwhile exchange but still something I missed. Having a group of organisers with specific responsibilities meant it was much easier to get problems solved and questions answered without worrying about pestering somebody. And one of the high points of the whole weekend was watching the Hale-Bopp comet with Laura's binoculars while a circle danced in candlelight below.
This year's Gathering was an enormous improvement on previous ones I've attended, both for the amount and quality of dancing, music and group feeling. It has moved on from being just a dance exchange to a real meeting of teachers and dancers, with opportunities to see how other people work with the whole group process. Praise to everybody involved and I'll see you all there next year.