My SCD Kaleidoscope Panel Contribution
Introduction
The SCD Kaleidoscope
conference held near Geneva, Switzerland, in July, 2009, included a
panel discussion on The Future of SCD: Can We Get There From Here?,
and I was invited to sit on the panel together with David Hall, Irene
Paterson, and Andrew Timmins. As part of the session, each of us was
invited to give a five-minute talk sharing our thoughts on the issue,
and this page roughly corresponds to that presentation – I will
probably forget to mention things that I said in Geneva, and elaborate
on other things that I didn’t have time for there, but there you
are. I have included the four interesting slides (the fifth is just a
title page); you can download the whole set of
slides in PDF format if you like.
NB. During my presentation I made a deliberate effort to talk about
the future of SCD, not the future of the
RSCDS. There are two reasons for this: First,
it wasn’t the topic of the panel. Second, I happen to believe that the
future of SCD does not necessarily require the RSCDS to be
around. There are many valid and important reasons why keeping the
RSCDS around in some form is probably a very good idea indeed, but it
is worth noting that the Society didn’t exist for most of the time
that country dancing existed, and it is pretty safe to say that SCD
would go on even if the Society vanished off the face of the Earth
tomorrow. Hence, “The Future of SCD”.
SCD and French Kissing
The first point that I brought up is what I call “The SCD
Relation”. Briefly:
SCD relates to Scotland as French kissing relates
to France. There are two important lessons we can learn from this.
Firstly, the Scots did not come up with the idea of (Scottish) country
dancing – they borrowed it from the English (and kept using it even
when the English were no longer interested very much). The Scots do
deserve a lot of credit for keeping SCD going when it was in danger of
going altogether extinct, and we all should be thankful to them for
that, but now that SCD is being done all over the world, including
many places that don’t happen to be part of the former British Empire,
there is no reason whatsoever why the Scots should get to “own” SCD
forever. Looking at the global SCD scene it is obvious that much of
the innovation there takes place outside Scotland, and we would do
well to acknowledge that SCD is now no longer a Scottish phenomenon
with the rest of the world reluctantly being allowed to tag along for
the ride, but a world-wide phenomenon with part of its historic roots
in Scotland, much like football is today a world-wide phenomenon with
its historic roots in England. As a German I am quite sick of needing
to defend my “right” to do SCD to nationalistic Scots who suggest I
really ought to be doing German folk dancing, which even though it
does happen, fortunately doesn’t happen too often.
[Side note (not from the conference): In fact, many of the
proverbially “Scottish” bits in SCD are just retro-romanticism, anyway
– there is no particular reason why one should, for example, be
wearing a kilt other than that the garment looks nice and feels good
for dancing. Certainly nobody wore the modern kilt for country dancing
in Scotland in the early 18th century, (a) because it hadn’t been
invented yet, and (b) because it would have been as out of place in
polite society as bathing trunks and flippers would be at the opera
today, i.e., you would be politely but firmly told to go
away. Besides, there are people who prefer dancing in trousers and if
they like it that way then I say more power to them.]
[
Another side note: We do use Scottish music for dancing and it
tends to work fine, but even way back when, the Scots didn’t think
twice about co-opting music from other traditions, e.g., Continental
opera, for their dancing if it could be made to fit. Whether a
particular tune is suitable for dancing to is, IMHO, more to do with
its rhythm and “lift” than the nationality of its composer. We’re
fortunate that Scottish musical history has left us with many
wonderful tunes that
are suitable for dancing, and
that people from Scotland as well as the worldwide SCD community are
adding more to the repertoire all the time, but again there is no rule
that says SCD can only ever be done to Scottish music, since this
hasn’t even been the case historically. For example,
The Glasgow Highlanders is quite a popular dance and indeed one of the very few
strathspeys that did survive into the 20th century as part of the
living tradition, but the official tune isn’t Scottish.]
Secondly, the SCD Relation reminds us that we do not need to encourage
the French to take up French kissing because it is part of French
cultural heritage. The French (and many people outside France) do it
because it is an enjoyable thing to do.
This implies that efforts to goad the Scots into doing SCD because it
is such a very Scottish thing to do (see the previous slide) are
fundamentally misguided. People in Scotland, like people anywhere,
should be doing SCD because they enjoy it, and if they do not enjoy
it they should by all means do something else that they do enjoy.
Which brings us to the second point.
World domination, fast!
[The title of this section derives from a very early interview with
Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux operating system. When he was
asked, some time during the mid-1990s, about his plans for the future
of Linux, he answered, somewhat but not completely tongue-in-cheek: “I
think my ‘plan’ says something like ‘World domination. Fast.’ But
we’ll see.”]
In former times in Scotland, everybody danced because it was
essentially the only game in town and television, let alone the
Internet, hadn’t been invented. Today in the globalised world and in
particular in places outside Scotland or even the “British
Commonwealth”, SCD needs to attract people who are not Scottish by
heritage and who have limited spare time. This means that SCD needs to
compete for “mind share” with other forms of dance as well as
completely different types of recreation. There are no hard and fast
recipes for doing this but the following (fairly obvious) points
should be repeated:
- Be open
- SCD groups and classes should be accommodating to visitors and “new
recruits” to as large an extent as is feasible. Nobody should be
turned away because their surname doesn’t start with “Mac” or
because they don’t seem to “get it” on their first attempt. SCD
groups should also actively communicate their existence through
appropriate channels (e.g., a web site, an aggregated web site of
various local dance groups, a local dance group umbrella
organisation, …) and work together with other local dance
organisations. The point should not be to “convert” others to SCD
but simply to “be there” in a very obvious way for anybody who might
be interested.
- Be special
- During the course of the 20th century, SCD has mutated
from a repertoire of a fairly small number of dances with a handful
of basic formations to a very large set of dances, many including
new formations of recent invention. SCD offers everything from very
simple dances for beginners to stamina-eating brain-teasers for
people who have been doing SCD for years. This is a good thing.
Many people who are now active in SCD enjoy SCD especially for the
challenge that many dances present to the body and
mind. Occasionally there are calls to the SCD community to get rid
of the newfangled material and restrict itself to “traditional”
dances like the Dashing White Sergeant and/or abolish aspects of
current technique such as the pas de basque (see, e.g., Finlay
Forbes’s article in Dance On!, issue 40). Such “dumbing down” of
SCD to make it more attractive to beginners would be fatal as it
would only serve to drive away the people to whom the challenge is
an essential part of the enjoyment. [Side note: It should also be
pointed out that there is nobody (not even the RSCDS) currently in a
position to effect such a “dumbing down” while a majority of the SCD
community enjoys dancing the way it is. Any attempts to the contrary
would only lead to a schism, with the proponents of challenging
dances and technique continuing just like before.]
- Be fun
- For most dancers today, SCD is not an expression of their
cultural identity but a recreational activity. They are not
interested in historical re-enactment nor close-order drill. There
is no question that mastery of SCD requires a certain amount of
technical instruction, much like other exploits such as football,
martial arts, scuba diving, or photography require technical
instruction. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with this. However
we should make sure that whatever instruction there needs to be is
presented in a way that does not turn people off SCD but instead
keeps them wanting to learn more. [Side note: There will always be
dancers who at some point decide for themselves (with or without
justification) that additional efforts on their part to perfect
their dancing are unlikely to lead to additional enjoyment on their
part. Sometimes this point may be reached fairly early in a dancer’s
career. This may be deplorable but not a reason to discourage these
people from continuing with SCD (at least if they have reached a
standard that allows them to join in a set without continually
spoiling the dance for the others). It is also important to note
that dancing ability and the ability to be part of a dance group do
not necessarily correlate – there are great-looking dancers who can
still be difficult to get along with as well as
not-that-great-looking dancers who are the life and soul of any
group that they join. The SCD community should try to offer a place
for both of these.] Besides, a dance group’s activities should not
restrict themselves to general dance instruction. The group I teach,
in addition to putting on an annual ball, delights in
“extracurricular” events like an annual tea dance, highland dancing,
etc., and (during school breaks, where the general class is in
recess) game evenings, visits to the cinema, pub, etc. The aim is to
offer dancers more than just SCD instruction, so they will identify
with the group as well as the SCD community at large.
Finally, we can learn from the “free software” scene that it is quite
possible to have a great community at 5% market share. That is, the
desktop computer market may be dominated by the Windows family of
operating systems, but within the niche of people running Linux there
is still a great number of people who can support each other as well
as generate considerable innovation – to a point where a “community”
operating system such as Linux is in many ways equal or even superior
to any commercial offering on the market. The same model will work for
SCD: We do not need to get everybody into SCD as long as we manage to
attract enough people to keep the community going.