15 f Ranting & Reeling I
can’t céilidh, won’t céilidh. To be more specific, I am hopeless at any form of traditional social dance. It gives me no pleasure to admit this, and I feel the need to offset it by saying I am an excellent dancer when left to my own devices. Given the freedom of the floor and Jim Moray’s legendary silent disco mashup as a soundtrack (where the likes of John Kirkpatrick’s immortal Jump At The Sun is fused with Katy Perry’s international breakthrough hit I Kissed A Girl) I’m like Travolta on greased rails. You can literally tell by the way I use my walk, I’m a woman’s man and I do not have time to talk. I can dance, I just can’t take instruction.
And being unable to tell my right hand star from my left allemande fre- quently means I miss out on the fun everyone else seems to be having. It caus- es great distress during the festival season that I will always be a wallflower in Whit- by, shunned from the shassay at Shrews- bury and a pariah of the Priddy polka.
At a recent launch party for
Disney/Pixar’s new Scotland-based adventure film Brave (featuring our own Julie Fowlis on the soundtrack) I was
dragged towards the Gay Gordons by a stranger who refused to accept my repeated cries of, “I can’t do it!” “But they teach you!” she yelled back. And that’s the bit I can’t do – be taught. I am a dance dyslexic.
Contra to popular opinion, not everyone can learn country dancing. One year at Towersey I vowed to attend all of Kerry Fletcher’s brilliant workshops, only to find I sabotaged every set and cocked up each couple dance. I recognised the barely disguised looks of scorn in my partners’ eyes as the same as those who were saddled with me in their school football teams, and shuffled out of the tent in shame. Seeking safety in both numbers and repetition I tried my feet at circle dances, only to balls up a Bourrée - losing my footing and stumbling side- ways into a girl I had very much hoped to impress. At beginner’s level we were essentially walking whilst holding hands, but such was the breakdown in brain to leg communication, it might just as well have been a Viennese waltz in manacles.
What I’ve come to realise is I’m a slow learner and a pusher of doors marked ‘Pull’. Year after year at my sec-
ondary mod- ern, I broke my own record for detentions – awarded not because I was truant, criminal or confronta- tional but because I’m incapable of doing what I’m told. Where once I was the
only boy cycling in the wrong direction of the headmaster’s newly installed one- way system, now I’m the only man going clockwise in the schottische.
Just as Chris Penn had Kevin Bacon to diligently coach him in the ways of town council-defying choreography, in the 1984 movie classic Footloose, I need someone with the patience of Job, a high tolerance for frustrated swearing and the rhythms of Playford in their soul, to strip my willow to the core and instil in me the confidence to look a caller in the eye and say, “Yes sir, I can céilidh. I can céilidh all night long.”
Tim Chipping
The Elusive Ethnomusicologist
directly in front and you’re approaching a crossroads on a bend. What should you be doing at this time? You must be shouting into your mobile held in your left hand and gesticulating wildly with your right. Red lights? Speed limits? Lanes? Suggestions only. I’m learning how to drive in southern Italy.
W
When Ian Anderson of this parish got on the phone and asked if I’d like to go to Puglia for some pizzica, I jumped at the chance. Very generous I said, but I’m not supposed to eat wheat. Pizzica you idiot, not pizza! Though having got to the sun-soaked heel of the country and not had any meal apart from breakfast which didn’t involve people bursting thoroughly, exuberantly and unself - consciously into song, it would seem that here the two are inextricably linked.
Pizzica, the traditional dance and its accompanying music of the region is enjoying a renaissance with thousands flocking to local festivals to get pissed and jiggle about a bit to bands which might be to the form what football fans
hen’s the best time to overtake? When there’s a truck speeding towards you, there’s no space between the two cars
belting out Nessun Dorma are to opera. As our guide and translator and fRoots favourite Nidi D’Arac’s manager, the wonderful Flaminia Vulcano, explained: “Those things you see, Elizabeth, the pizzica dancing on the internet… those are not proper dancers. It might as well be you doing it.” And so she took us on a whirlwind tour with the fabulous pizzica and traditional singer Anna Cinzia Villani – who sings as uninhibitedly as she drives – to the heart of the tradition.
This involved tearing across the length and breadth of Puglia, through scorching days and chilly nights, to meet singers and dancers and musicians young and old (mostly old) who generously talked and sang and/or played for us. Often this meant performing in secret, for the songs are jealously guarded.
On one occasion, we drove for hours to pick up two old ladies under cover of darkness, then drove on again for miles to a secluded country house at the edge of the country, so that they could per- form without anyone else knowing. They hadn’t sung for five years because they were in mourning, and though keen now to sing, they didn’t want to be seen to break with their tradition.
After a
few wrong turns up tiny tracks, finally – under a clear starlit mid- night, in the grounds of our friend’s estate – we picnicked on soft moz- zarella and ricotta bought by the kilo, on
green salad just pulled from the ground and figs freshly plucked from the tree, all washed down with the local wine – and the women sang. Their voices were incredible; the sound they made spine- tingling and engulfing. They let me join in. Who knew that proper ethno-musico- logical research could be so utterly life affirming and uplifting?
You will be able to read about our exciting adventures into the secret heart of pizzica in the November/ December Womex issue of fRoots, unless of course my book Speeding In The Dark: Exploring Italian B Roads By Night is out first.
Elizabeth Kinder
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100