Writing a blog, I am often frustrated by either my failure to take the pictures I should or my inability to transmit certain sensations to all y’all.  I want you to be able to smell what I’m baking or cooking, or the flowers in my garden, or even my wet dog when he comes in from the rain.  I want you to be able to taste the bridies I make, or the cannoli, or polpette.  And I want you to be able to feel the things I make out of leather or yarn or fabric.  And I want you to be able to see things in motion, hence the little movie of me knitting last week.  No matter how much I think we manage to connect in this little community we make in the ether, it’s not quite enough sometimes.

Mostly, I want your ears.

A while back, I wrote a little something called “I am Not Quiet.”  That title is one of the truest lines I’ve ever written. See, a major portion of my head-space is taken up by music and dance.  I love poetry as much as I do because it is music, and it’s the form of music I have the strongest hold on.  I’m better with words than I am with strings, particularly since my body started turning on me.  So I write, and I sing a lot, and I study the songs and poems available to me.  Sometimes I still play tunes, but not enough.

In just about everything I do, I’m trying to learn more about folk arts.  The music, the songs, the dance, the arts and crafts, the food–it’s all about preserving and disseminating culture for me.

Live dance and music are and should be intertwined. They form a wholly/holy communal pact when everything is right.  Musicians are playing for dancers, and dancers are dancing together, as a group, to thank each other and the musicians.  When I was dancing with the Hoorahs, most of the musicians who played for us were also dancers.  It was ideal.  It was so good, I’m tearing up just picturing the solo break in Flapjack.  Man, I wish I could show you all the little movie in my head.  Sheew dooggy.   I am one lucky lunatic.

My dancing is about sound as much as it is about movement, if not more.  Percussive dance is particularly important to me because, as an art form, it has been largely commodified and codified and crushed.  As it’s been commodified, it is stripped of history and style and myth.  It’s happened to Irish step dance–Sean Nos is losing ground.  It is happening to clogging and tap now.  Most dance students only hear recorded music and only learn steps that are identical to those learned 500 miles away.  I shudder to think what out grandkids will be left with, if none of them learn from regular folks in their community at community classes.  I have visions of automatons in jingle taps.  Satan is behind the freaky homogonization happening in percussive dance, I tell you, and Satan wants you to buy jingle taps.

If I never manage to get my poetry out to a wider audience, I think I’ll be ok.  But if I fail to transmit the steps I’ve learned from the generous dancers who have taught me what I know, then I’ll actually feel like a failure.  And I have to get teaching now, because my limbs are screwed up.  I’m not the dancer I was ten years ago.  I don’t want to lose any more ground before I share the knowledge that’s held in my feet.

All of which is why I was particularly happy to teach a bit of clogging to some of my nearest and dearest over the Fourth.  And why dance will hopefully take up more space here for a while.  I’ll gather up all of the notes from the classes I’ve taught and put them here for the folks I’m teaching.  If you want to start learning something about percussive dance, well, darn it, I’m your girl, and I’m your girl right now.  Not in five years.  Not when you finish that big project.  The sooner you hit me up for a lesson, the more I can show you.  I’m not looking for money–I’m looking to leave a sonic legacy.

Stomp shuffle-step shuffle-step, stomp stomp,  shuffle-step shuffle-step, stomp stomp, shuffle-step drag shuffle-step drag stomp, shuffle-step drag shuffle-step drag stomp

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