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Saturday, March 22, 2014

Save the Date: Sat, May 3, 2014: Stone Soup

We've reserved the Fellowship Hall for our annual Stone Soup Party for Saturday, May 3, 2014.  Further details to come in a later post.

It was great to have such a good turnout for our Fri, March 7 get-together with Ethnic Dance Chicago, including dancers from more than just the two groups.  Seemed like that was almost the first Friday that it didn't snow so far this year, luckily.

In case you've been trying to remember the dances that were taught that night:

Paul taught "A Trip to Town-O" -- here's a link to a video of some 5th graders doing the dance, to remind you of the pattern: https://www.schooltube.com/video/28a47e03704467de8d20/

He also taught Damat Halay -- here's a link for instructions + various videos of that:
http://folkdancemusings.blogspot.com/2013/12/damat-halayi-turkey.html

Here's a video of Moonlight Swing:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32Jops3-SQk
 -- almost the same as what we do, except right at the end after the jazz box, where we do grapevines, the guy in the video does something slightly different

And here's Promoroaca: http://youtu.be/5qNWoyRmdqU -- if your memory is better than mine, you may realize that I goofed on the first part, and did 4 measures each direction, but it should be 8 measures all in the same direction, as in the video.

Sorry that I couldn't find any videos for "Cajun Express" that Susan taught.

In addition to google-ing for the name of a folk dance to find instructions or videos, there are a number sites that have a lot of them already compiled and indexed, here are a few:
http://folkdancemusings.blogspot.com/p/alphabetical-list-of-dance-notes-on.html
http://wiki.volksmusik.cc/wiki/index.php/Full_dance_list
http://archives.mvfolkdancers.com/0_Other%20Items%20of%20Interest/0_Dance%20Instructions/
http://www.folkdance.com/html/LDDescriptions.htm
http://www.daytonfolkdance.com/l_links.html#descriptions

Besides the aforementioned Stone Soup, here are a few other upcoming events of potential interest around the area:
Fri-Sun Mar 28-30: Balkanske Igri Spring Festival, International House, UofC http://www.balkanskiigri.com/
Wed Apr 23 7:30pm: Oak Park Folkdancers Annual Potluck, 515 Franklin, River Forest, IL
Thu-Sun May 29-Jun 1: June Camp w/Steve Kotansky, Beloit College:  https://sites.google.com/site/junecampifd/