Scenes from the Birthday Balfolk Weekend

This weekend I went to two Balfolk events, one in Enschede and one in Utrecht. Balfolk is a kind of European folk dance party – live music and dances with really simple steps (well, to start with – you can make it complicated if you know what you’re doing). Some of them you’d probably recognize, like waltzes and polkas, but there’s also things like jigs, Magic Circles, and several whose names I did not catch because they were just too European.

Here’s a bunch of little stories from my two days dancing:

My first jig was an enormous success. We’d just finished the tutorial where all of the newbies learned the steps, and it was entirely in Dutch, but I followed pretty successfully with only a tiny bit of translation help. My first couple of partners did the basic steps (it’s the kind of dance where the women get passed around to different partners,) but then we switched and the next person did something different, lifting his arm to spin me instead of just turning around like we’d learned in the introduction. So I got to spin around, and did not trip over my own feet, and for the rest of the dance floated from variation to variation of the steps with no idea what I was doing and yet somehow doing it anyway. The second jig was a complete disaster – I’d gotten distracted by something the dance before, and the clueless enthusiasm that had gotten me through the first one somehow turned into confusion, which turned into knocking the girl in front of me over right in front of the stage. The moral of that story is that distracted dancing is a bit like distracted driving in that it will lead to collisions.

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The guitarist for the band started playing a beautiful solo song, and for a while no one was sure which dance it was. But slowly couples started strolling around the dance floor, in a lilting, waltz-like sort of step. Then, apparently at random, couples would break out of the circle to twirl, before settling back into the steps. The music was this lovely, floaty acoustic piece, and the couples strolling and spinning looked exactly like a music box brought to life.

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People dancing Mazurkas sometimes look every bit as awkward as middle schoolers attempting to slow dance at their first dance. I know this because I sat a few out and watched, but it came as a surprise, because once you’re settled into the rhythm of the steps and maybe get a few turns going, you feel every bit as graceful and elegant as if you were a Disney princess hitting the ballroom floor.

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Whenever the musicians announced a waltz, you could either hear people reassuring each other that it was a “gewoone waltz,” just a normal waltz in 3, or else that it was some more difficult count, at which point there would be a tiny exodus from the dance floor as the newer dancers cleared out. But the waltz in 5 looked like a lot of fun, so a few minutes into the second one that the musician in Utrecht played I got up the courage to ask a girl to dance it with me. She said yes – if I led. I had been studiously avoiding leading, mostly by dancing with guys or with girls who knew the dances better. But I really wanted to try the waltz in 5, so… “Sure, but it might end in disaster.” And there were bits of disaster, like when we tried to make small talk and promptly lost the count. But we didn’t run into anyone, and by halfway through the dance we had gotten into the rhythm, and got halfway around the dance floor in graceful, in-time steps before confusion struck again. By the end of it I felt dizzy and incredibly accomplished.

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