Folk dancing is anything but a spectator sport. As a newcomer to the Scottish dance class, I sit hunched in a corner. Watching the more experienced dancers, I try to look inconspicuous. Dancing—I will be the first to say—has never really been my forte.

The music to one dance ends. It’s light and jumpy—a sort of doo-doo-doo that goes on for several bars. On the stage, live musicians play—piano, guitars, even bagpipes. The music is uplifting and absorbing, and I am perfectly content to just listen and watch.

No such luck. Looking for a new partner, a young man comes over, holds out a hand, smiles, and asks if I’d care to dance. It’s delightfully archaic—a gesture from a time when “courtship” still meant something. I protest: “I can’t dance. Really, I’m not very good.”

“Can you walk?” he asks.

Good point. I follow him to the floor and join a line of about 20 dancers. I look around nervously, receiving a thumbs-up sign from one and a reassuring smile from another. I grab my partner’s hand, imitating his light hopping motion, which switches from the ball of one foot to the toe of the other and back again. I kind of get it. My movement isn’t perfect, but no one expects it to be. Everyone learns the step, pivots around each other, and walks through the rotations a few times. The music begins again; “six bars,” the teacher calls.

Scottish dancing is harder—and easier—than it looks. The precise steps elude me; that, I know, will take time. Still, I get the overall motion, the pattern I must follow to execute my part. I can hardly help not to, as my fellow dancers eagerly direct me at every step. They’re so helpful, so open; they know, as I will soon learn, that the dance works only if everyone does it together. I lift my heel, kick my opposite toe out, and give it my best shot. A smile spreads across my face—I’m not half as bad as I thought.

“Remember we were all new once. You’re doing great,” I hear. My partner gently nudges me to the correct corner after my last “pas de basque.”

I can’t help but trust him.

Skipping and stepping their way into College history, members of Swarthmore’s Folk Dance Club have gathered to enjoy just such dances for more than 50 years. Second only to The Phoenix as the most venerable extracurricular activity on campus, folk dance can be traced back to the 1940s, when Irene Moll, an instructor in the Physical Education Department, started a folk dance class. The activity—and what some might call a folk-dancing subculture—has thrived at Swarthmore ever since.

Yet this year, for the first time in its history, the Folk Dance Club has found itself in a perilous position. The growth of the curricular Dance Program has put a premium on time in the College’s dance studios. With the expansion of the academic Dance Program, folk dance—an extracurricular social activity—has had to move to the Swarthmore Community Club, located just off-campus not far from the Pittenger, Palmer, and Roberts residence halls.

“I think we’ve all been frustrated by the constant struggle to find time and space in the dance studios over the past few years,” says Hollis Easter ’03, co-president of the club and a four-year dancer. “This year, the Dance Program told us they didn’t have room for us at all, and I think it’s fair to say we were disappointed by that decision.”

“The studios [in the Lang Performing Arts Center or LPAC] were constructed for the use of the academic Dance Program. These spaces are our laboratories,” explains Sharon Friedler, Stephen Lang Professor of Performing Arts and director of the Dance Program within the Department of Music and Dance. “Folk dance has been a very important community in the Swarthmore lexicon for years. I think it’s wonderful, and as long as we were able to accommodate it, we did. But in the 10 years since the opening of the LPAC, the entire performance-based Dance Program—both curricular and co-curricular—has expanded.”

Swarthmore’s Dance Program, first granted academic status in the late 1970s, has grown significantly under the leadership of Friedler. Since she arrived at the College in 1985, the program has provided instruction in a wide variety of dance techniques, currently including African, Balinese, ballet, contact improvisation, flamenco, Kathak, modern, tap, and yoga. The program also offers composition courses, repertory classes, and instructions in the study of dance history and theory—all taught in the LPAC studios. “The program looks at dance forms from all over the world, linking practice and theory,” explains Friedler.

Between 300 and 350 students now enroll in dance classes each semester and, as Friedler points out, performance dance initiatives are not limited to the formal technique classes but also include student-run choreography projects. Current student-run performance dance organizations include Dance Forum, Rhythm ’N’ Motion, and Terpsichore—and all of these courses, performance projects, and groups require time in the two studios.

Folk dance—a social dance form—is not included within the realm of performance dance. “We’ve made an effort to build an inclusive—not exclusive—program,” says Friedler. “But the fact remains that we are interested in dance as a performance art. We applaud and support and are delighted that people wish to folk dance. I folk dance myself. But it’s a different thing than what we’re involved in as a department.”

Timothy Williams ’64, professor emeritus of biology and a former Swarthmore folk dancer, acknowledges that the campus studios are already used to capacity. He thinks the real problem is not a clash of interests between academic and nonacademic dancing but instead that the campus lacks an adequate amount of suitable dance space.

“The best solution would be to make some space available for non-dance-program activity,” Williams says. Such an area, he explains, could be used for folk, swing, and ballroom dances as well as for aerobics classes. Because the all-campus space already available in Clothier Hall is frequently scheduled for parties, dances, and large events, it is an unreliable venue for a regular weekly or twice-weekly class.

“It seems a shame that a program so vital to Swarthmore can’t have a space on campus with a wooden floor,” says Terry Harvey, who teaches club classes in Scottish country dance. “I don’t see folk dance stopping, but I’m worried about having moved off campus. It’s a big psychological change to no longer be in College space. I would rather have the College embrace folk dance and find a location for it.”

Despite its move, the folk dance club is functioning as always, with 20 to 30 students enrolling in the classes each semester. Other members of the community—faculty and staff, alumni, and Swarthmore residents—are also welcome. Though a wide variety of forms (including Balkan, international, Morris, highland, rapper, and English long sword) have been taught at Swarthmore in the past, the club currently focuses mainly on English and Scottish country dancing. All-campus contra dances are also held a couple of times a year, and workshops in a variety of other dance styles are typically offered a few times a year.

The club’s biggest event, the annual English-Scottish Ball, is held in Clothier Hall around Valentine’s Day each year. Geoffrey Selling ’71, founder of the event, said the English-Scottish Ball is a student-run dance that generally attracts between 30 and 40 alumni from across the country each year (see sidebar).

Eileen Thorsos ’03, folk dance co-president with Easter and another four-year dancer, remembers what brought her to the club in the first place. Although she had studied ballet and tap in elementary school, Thorsos had simply refused to dance for a long time after that. “I hardly ever exercised,” she says. “I was more comfortable reading or doing some other intellectual thing. Dancing when I was around other people was even more risky.” Yet, in fall of her freshman year, she decided to attend an all-campus contra dance. In contra, a New England style of folk dance, partners join hands with a long group of couples and, listening to the instructions of the caller, execute a series of patterns. Like all folk dancing, it’s an inherently social dance, accessible to beginners and advanced students alike.

“I loved it,” says Thorsos. “In part, I think I was hug-deprived. I was used to getting hugs from my mother every day; then, I came to college, and there were all these people I couldn’t touch.” From that point on, she was hooked. She started doing not only English and Scottish country dancing but also Argentine tango, swing, and flamenco—all during her first semester at Swarthmore. “There’s this happy, warm, relaxed, sweaty feeling you get after dancing,” Thorsos says, “like an endorphin high.”

The dancing itself is about patterns of skipping and stepping and shifting and waltzing and circling. It’s about bowing at the beginning and end of each dance, synchronizing the body to the music, and joining together to create the intricate patterns that become the dance. “It’s kind of like that whole Jane Austen remake movie. The live music really adds to that. You could just see Mr. Knightly changing positions,” says Aviva Aron-Dine ’05, a first-year folk dancer.

Folk dancing at Swarthmore is a melting pot of the old-fashioned and the modern. Students generally dress down for classes—jeans or sweatpants, though some women wear skirts—and only don formal wear for the English-Scottish Ball. Still, as the dancers line up, with uneven numbers of men and women often requiring temporary shifts in traditional gender roles, thoughts about what everyone is wearing fall away.

The dancers bow and grab hands, arms held firmly and fixedly, eye contact maintained. Then they skip, or shift, or “step change,” or “strathspey,” or “pas de basque” in Scottish class. On English nights, they start a stately lilting walk.

As Jenny Beer, Swarthmore’s English country dance instructor, explains, English folk dance has “minimal footwork—if you can walk, you can dance.” In both dances, though, once the music begins, the patterns made are what matters. From overhead, the dance should look like an intricate secret, an intangible entity impossible to separate into individual components. Yet for those who smile and bow and curtsy at its conclusion, it’s a secret to which every one of them is privy.

In fact, it is the dance’s accessibility that students, faculty, and alumni alike praise repeatedly. “Folk dance covers territory that is also covered by the sports teams or the performance dance classes. But very little about it is competitive, and the emphasis is not on performance,” explains Sibelan Forrester, associate professor of Russian and folk dance faculty liaison. “Particularly for someone who’s kind of shy or doesn’t have a lot of physical confidence coming out of high school, folk dance can be a great way to participate in physical activity.”

“For me, there’s a joy in movement in folk dancing that I haven’t found in some of the other dance movements I’ve tried,” says Easter ’03. Like Thorsos, Easter also “had this great fear of dancing all through high school. I didn’t want to go folk dancing because I was sure I wouldn’t be good at it. But my friends dragged me there, I protested mightily, and here I am now.”

Also a bagpiper on the Canadian Circuit in Ontario, Easter says the live music available at every Swarthmore folk dance class “has gotten me into some of the music I now play.” Yet, it is mostly the social aspect of the dance that brings him back week after week—the guarantee that he will see his friends and have a good time. The dance community, Easter stresses, is accessible and open, based on ideals of trust and cooperation that give the dance meaning. “The dance doesn’t go if everyone doesn’t work as a team. And that can bring the wonderful sense of being part of something larger.”

The class is winding down. I’m more tired than expected; this last dance seems so much harder than the first. I wipe my hand across my forehead and am surprised to find it just a bit damp. But as I line up to face my partner—a different one this time—I remember that they’re all counting on me. “Be careful of the pole,” someone says. Columns are arrayed on the sides of the dance floor at the Community Club—a surmountable obstacle, I think. “If we were in the LPAC...,” I hear. It’s almost funny, a political statement in an apolitical setting.

The music swells. I rise on my toes, almost automatically now, and reach for my partner’s hand. My arms are more fixed than earlier, though certainly far from perfect. I take a deep breath; look into his eyes; and step off, circling around him in a skipping step. This step—and my partner’s—is where the dance begins again.