Argonne International Folk Dancing: October 2016

Saturday, October 29, 2016

Sad news: Willowbrook Ballroom

Just heard this evening that the Willowbrook Ballroom burned down this afternoon.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/western-springs/news/ct-dbr-willowbrook-ballroom-fire-tl-1103-20161028-story.html

Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Penguin Dances

While browsing on Pinterest, I came across this purportedly USA folk dance, apparently being done in Italy:

As near as I can tell from my almost non-existent Italian, it's meant to be done with 5 couples, corresponding to 5 times thru the music, so that each couple gets to be the "protagonist". I don't think we'll be adding it to our repertoire anytime soon, though.

But then in the sidebar on youtube I came across an entirely different penguin dance, which basically looks like the bunnyhop, but to much catchier music, and seems to be done at weddings all over the world, and all over social media:

There's a blog dedicated to it: https://penguindancemania.wordpress.com/
Which includes this German video from 1965 of a dance called "Letkiss", along the same lines:

If you try to look up "Penguin Dance" on Wikipedia, you get routed to the Bunny Hop:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunny_hop_(dance)

Which also refers to it by the Finnish name "Letkajenkka" -- and you can find a lot of videos with that music (as in the 1965 Letkiss video).

Here are links to the recent Penguin Dance music:
https://play.google.com/store/music/artist/Penguen_Dans%C4%B1?id=Aaqbezmzrffb4lz5wxxxfvqqycq
https://www.amazon.com/Penguin-Dance-Penguen-Dans/dp/B00ICS5XWM
https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/penguin-dance-single/id816529903

Sunday, October 9, 2016

Erik Butterworth's Music Database and others

This site has lots of information, including sheet music transcriptions for Bulgarian and other primarily Balkan folk music:
http://goldov.com/butterw/
http://goldov.com/butterw/emdb/

For example, searching for the titles of dances taught at Oconomowoc, I found sheet music for Toicevo and Tamatan, (I added the links to the previous post-Oconomowoc post).

Another place to looks for sheet music is:
http://abcnotation.com/search

From there I found music for Apley House , Passu Torrau , and Toicevo.

A couple more places to find folk dance sheet music:
http://dickatlee.com/music/dick/index.html#tunes
http://balkanarama.com/charts.htm

Sunday, October 2, 2016

post-Oconomowoc web surfing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK8haY9Mv84 Циганско хоро

And I couldn't find the exact version of Popcorn that Daniel showed us at the after-party, but there are similar ones, like this:

https://youtu.be/Z2_gDmEbhrc

And some less similar, including an Irish Step Dance version:

https://youtu.be/YfdLh0MHqKw

https://youtu.be/-3iAk90Qt_E

https://youtu.be/MDRP51U_LKI?t=4m55s "River a Popcorn"

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002NRW2YK/ref=dm_ws_tlw_trk1

https://play.google.com/store/music/album?id=B3dml42a6fre4of7v52cs6budie&tid=song-T7tb3dyqb6panfjpjzvsmixggfy

https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/hot-butter/id5355589

Oconomowoc 2016 video clips - YouTube playlist

Sorry this post is so delayed -- I tried to upload the videos to blog posts as I've done in the past, but blogger wasn't cooperating. I tried 4 different browsers, two different computers with 2 different operating systems, two different video formats, but nothing worked -- it would upload successfully, but the "Processing video" step never finished, it just disappeared leaving only a broken link. Anyway, after googling to see if I could find a solution, I finally found that the easiest thing would be to create a YouTube channel, put all the video clips in a playlist, and embed that in a blog post. Hopefully this will work, probably better than the old ways, anyway. I made the videos and the playlist "Unlisted", which means you can see them if you have the link, but they won't show up when searching YouTube. Sorry for boring you with the details, but after several hours of wrestling with it, I just had to complain a little :-)

PRI "The World": Bhangra Nova Scotia Style

http://www.pri.org/stories/2016-09-28/check-out-bhangra-beach-nova-scotia-style

Hava Nagila: The Movie on WTTW Create Sun Oct 2 8pm

http://www.havanagilamovie.com/

Hava Nagila (The Movie)
369WTTWC 8:00 - 9:00p

Johnny Yune, Josh Kun, Connie Francis
(2012) A detailed look at the history of the Jewish song "Hava Nagila," which is routinely played at celebrations such as weddings and bar mitzvahs. This documentary also includes interviews with celebrities and musicians.

http://www.pbs.org/program/hava-nagila/

Looks like it repeats at midnight