Scottish Dances - Highland Dancing and Scottish Country
81There are two main styles of traditional dancing in Scotland - Scottish Country Dancing and Highland Dancing.
Scottish Country Dancing
Scottish Country Dancing is Scotland’s version of social partner dancing. It’s always danced in groups, in much the same way as courtly dancing or square dancing. Many Scots will know enough to get up and join in one or two dances. They're often danced at social events (even at the pub!), whereas only trained dancers would attempt Highland Dancing.
Scottish Country Dancing is an ideal hobby, because it’s good exercise as well as being very social. You don't need a partner because you're dancing in a group and will be paired up for each dance. Even if you do have a partner, you have to cooperate with other couples in the dance, which is a great ice-breaker.
Danced properly, Scottish Country Dancing is energetic - while in
motion, the dancers are up on their toes at all times, skipping
and hopping in a variety of bouncy steps. It's definitely cardiovascular exercise! Fortunately, there are plenty of chances to take a breather because usually,
only one or two couples are dancing at any one time.
A Typical Scottish Country Dance
Most dances follow a similar pattern. The dancers form into lines (or for a reel, a circle), each dancer facing his or her partner. The top one or two couples dance with each other for a few bars, then move to the bottom of the group so the next one or two couples can have their turn.
Within that simple pattern there is scope for a huge number of variations: for instance, the top couple can peel off and dance down the outside of the group, or weave in and out of the other dancers, or dance down the middle. Sometimes the other couples simply take a couple of steps to move up the line, and sometimes the whole group breaks into dance, crossing over or changing places multiple times until they settle down into a new order.
Scottish Country Dancing at a Scottish party
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Highland Dancing
Highland Dance is a performance art, not a social dance. If you're a Highland Dancer, you’ll probably attend classes, take exams and perhaps compete at Highland Games.
It's usually danced solo: if you see a line of Highland dancers, they’re more likely to be competing against each other than dancing together! Sometimes you’ll see Highland dancers performing en masse at events like the Edinburgh Tattoo. There are also a few specific dances (like the sword dance) that are performed by a group of two, three or four dancers.
Highland dancers wear a lighter version of full Highland dress.
Outside Scotland, you'll see other costumes being worn - but to the purist, all dances except one (the Seann Triubhas, meaning "old trousers") should be danced in a kilt. Women are allowed to wear a tartan skirt instead, but few do.
Other costumes are allowed in the National Dances, which were invented in the 19th century for women (who weren't allowed to take part in Highland Dancing at the time). When I lived in Scotland, these 'artificial' dances were completely out of favor - I see them more often abroad than in their land of origin!
Highland Dancing technique is similar to ballet, including a turnout (though not as extreme as ballet), pointed toes, and curved arms. Highland dancers become very fit and toned, because the dances are energetic and are danced on the toes almost throughout. The downside is that the calves can become large and over-developed, which girls can find embarrassing (I've never met a female Highland dancer who can wear knee-high zip boots!).
Scottish dancing has spread throughout the world with Scottish migration. Like other national dances, it's now danced by many people who have little or no connection with its country of origin, simply because it's enjoyable and challenging.
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All text copyright Marisa Wright. Scottish country photo by graymalkn. Sword dance photo by k4dordy.
A Scottish Country Dance Class
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Very true, Lissie!
wonderful. :)
I do love Scottish country dancing, it is sooo much fun. I wish it was more popular outside Scotland, there are enough Scottish people living abroad, they should spread their music for the delight of all the rest of us.
well heres a shout out from houston texas, ive been scottish country dancing for about a year now and i love it.
will keep to keep the dancers fit
Hey, nice article. I'm a highland dancer, you're right about the calves, i have trouble slipping my skinny leg jeans over them. I actually have a couple of corrections for your highland dance article (sorry!). In highland dances girls always wear a kilt costume and not a tartan skirt. In national dances the requirement is a tartan skirt (abogyne costume- excuse my spelling0. Also, the sword is a solo dance...
Linda, thanks for the comment and the corrections. When I was growing up, I had never seen female dancers wearing anything but the kilt for Highland dancing. Since coming to Australia I've often seen girls wearing costumes more suited to national dances. I did some research and found several sources which said it's OK for girls to wear a tartan skirt so I included it. I'll try to think of a better way to write the sentence - I meant it to say that it's usually danced in a kilt but that girls can wear a tartan skirt,not that they always wear one.
Again, I grew up seeing the sword dance as a solo dance but outside competition, the fashion now seems to be for groups of two or four. I was watching the Edinburgh Tattoo on TV just last Sunday, and there it was, in two groups of eight (which I thought looked silly, BTW, as they didn't have room to dance between the swords properly). I do say that Highland is primarily a solo dance style, but that there are exceptions.
Thanks also for the reminder about Aboyne dress - I couldn't remember the name!
This is wonderful! I'd love to see more hubs on Highland Dancing, with more active comments. It is espcially interesting to see the differences in this Scottish art form from one country to the next, and from one decade to the next.
These days I think you could probably include Scottish ceilidh dancing as a third, distinct form. Though I haven't done much of it, my general impression is that it's much looser than SCD. Many of the dances are the same, but there's more clapping, stomping and whooping, and no footwork involved. (Perhaps a wee dram or two on the side?)
As a SCD teacher in the US, I see the average age of the dancers involved getting older and older, with fewer young people coming in to replace them. Some teachers and the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society (RSCDS) itself, see ceilidh dancing as a bridge to bring younger people into SCD.
You can learn more at these two sites:
There are many branches of the RSCDS worldwide. The Boston Branch's site is:
As a Scot myself, I wouldn't agree with you, but maybe times have changed - I left Scotland nearly 30 years ago.
In my day, the dances danced at weddings and ceilidhs were Scottish Country Dances. People knew the proper steps and sequences. True, they were danced with more abandon (my uncles used to birl me round so fast in Strip the Willow, my feet left the ground), but that doesn't mean they weren't correctly done. In fact the sanitized, polite and rather courtly versions danced in exhibitions and competions are less authentic if anything!
But I suppose like anything, old traditions are dying out. Maybe these days, people at ceilidhs are dancing something totally different!
No footwork involved? Strasphey-- gracious, how do you spell it-- had such an elegant step, and I always had a heck of a time getting my feet right in petronella. I suppose country dancing steps aren't half so complicated as highland, though.
I miss Scottish Country Dancing. I grew up going to the big Scottish Games in Fair Hill, Maryland, with all the pipe bands and highland dancers down from Nova Scotia. When I wasn't curled up in the tent with harper Laurie Riley or watching my hero Ed McComas toss cabers and bags about (I thought it was a "sheep toss" -- eek!) I was in the country dancing tent. I had a fair bit of it in college. That was a long time ago now. Oh, there was a lovely dancer who quite captured my heart in that class... when we were dancing together, even I could dance well!
Thanks so much for the memories, Marisa.
Edit: looking at that class (last video), I really don't remember any clapping in our country dancing. But I suppose it varies.
The first video, the party, looks so familiar, though! I once knew all those figures' names.
Greekgeek, Scottish Country Dancing only has six or seven different steps. And if you're only dancing it socially, you can get by with pas de basque and skip step for nearly everything.
Scottish Country Dancing danced in exhibitions and competitions looks different from the social version, and I find that SCD taught outside Scotland often looks different again.
I just did social. But our instructor at Bryn Mawr College (how's that for a name?) was Scottish, very much so, a stately old lady who taught it as she'd learned it. pas de basque, that must've been the slow step I liked. I have arthritis so I preferred the slow dances to jigs.
And I always got lost in reels. I could do figures with 2 or 4 people, but as soon as we started doing something with 3 people on the side and one post standing still, I turned into a little lost ladybug bumbling around.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying that SCD has changed into what I describe, just that it seems to have evolved into a separate category called Ceilidh Dancing that appears to be more popular among young people in Scotland. Do a search on YouTube and you'll see what I mean. For instance, SCDer's will recognize the form of Dashing White Sargeant, but see that the style is quite different in a ceilidh dance.
"Ceilidh" is the name given to Scottish (and Irish) parties that usually include dancing, singing, storytelling, jokes and a lot of socializing in general. "Ceilidh dancing" is the name given to the form I describe. You can certainly have a ceilidh with SCD or ceilidh dancing, or both.
Pas de basque is a step used in reels and jigs, mostly in place for balancing or setting, but it can also be used to travel as in the figure called the poussette. Most dancing in reels and jigs is done with the skip change step, with slipping step thrown in mostly for circles.
Strathspey is a slower tempo. Older, and less fit, and less experienced dancers find it easier to get around in a strathspey, but done properly, the footwork is actually more strenuous!
@lonwright, I understood you perfectly. You're saying that what people dance now at ceilidhs looks very different from SCD. After your comment, I went to take a look at a few Youtube videos of ceilidhs. Maybe I didn't find the right ones, but I'm not seeing it.
In the clips I saw, people were dancing just as they did in country halls across Scotland when I was a kid, 50 years ago. Untidy, not technically correct, with lots of "heuch"-ing and clapping and shouts of glee, but still SCD.
SCD is a social dance, meant to be danced by ordinary people in their street shoes. Real SCD is not taught in classes - it's passed on from generation to generation, as I learned it from my parents and aunts and uncles at weddings and birthday parties in my childhood.
My two older sisters did go to classes, and performed at competitions and exhibitions at a high level, so I'm very well aware of the differences between the raw, earthy SCD of the country hall and the courtly, technically refined "official" version.
To me, the difference between what you call "ceilidh dancing" and SCD is the difference between social and competition ballroom dancing (which I also dance). Go to a ballroom comp and you'll see competitors in foxtrot, elbows high, with their heads turned away from each other. Go to a social dance and you'll see people foxtrotting in an upright position with much more relaxed arms and heads. It's still Foxtrot: both couples know the same basic steps and figures. The difference is that the competition couple care about the technique and have practised long and hard to get it perfect - the social couple are happy to know enough to get by.
The SCD, as taught in RSCDS classes, is certainly between ceilidh dancing and competition like you see for ballroom dancing. It's very social, but still dancers are expected to know, or want to learn, how to do the steps and figures correctly. That doesn't prevent them from having fun. (I don't know of any competitions in the US, but I understand they are still held in the UK.)
Perhaps I should start my own hub strictly on SCD?
The same thing exists in ballroom dancing. I attend ballroom classes like that myself - so I'm a bit better than social dancers who learned "on the dance floor" when ballroom was common, but I don't have the finesse of competition dancers.
But I certainly don't look down my nose at those social dancers and say "that's not ballroom", just because they're lacking in technique or style. In my mind, the same goes for "ceilidh dancers": so long as they know the figures, and an approximation of the steps, they're still Scottish Country Dancing - and in some ways, they're doing it in a more authentic way, closer to the way SCD was originally danced in those Scottish country halls fifty-odd years ago.
I think it would be a great idea to write some of your own Hubs on SCD. Just bear in mind that your experience as an American may differ from that of a Scot born and brought up in Scotland.
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References
- Grand Chain - the Scottish Dance Resource
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- Scottish Country Dancing
- Scottish Country dance resource pages
Scottish Country dance resources - RSCDS — The Royal Scottish Country Dance Society
- What is Scottish Country Dancing, Anyway?
Lissie Level 1 Commenter 4 years ago
YOu should tag this with "fitness" too - most non-dancers have no idea what is involved doing either regular social dancing or competitive stuff - its definitly good for the brain and the body!