rec.folk-dancing

The group and its era

rec.folk-dancing belongs to the older stratum of the rec.* hierarchy, and it arrived by an unusual route: not from a proposal drawn up in the abstract, but from a mailing list that already worked. A folk-dance mailing list had been running since the late 1980s, and the newsgroup followed about a year later on the strength of the traffic the list was already carrying. The list was not wound up when the group appeared but went on alongside it, relaying the newsgroup’s articles by e-mail to readers who could not take a news feed or did not want one.

The one-line description carried in the lists that travelled with every feed was as broad as it could be: Folk dances, dancers, and dancing. That covered several activities which overlapped rather less than an outsider might assume, and the group held all of them at once. It was unmoderated, like most of rec.*, and never large; in place of volume it had a readership of people who actually danced — dancers, callers, musicians and teachers.

What was discussed

The largest constituency was international folk dance: the recreational hobby, strongest in North America and with a following in Europe, Japan and Australia, in which people learn dances from traditions that are not their own. It grew out of immigrant communities in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, is often attributed to the Lithuanian-American teacher Vytautas Beliajus, and by the late 1940s the residential summer camp, gathered around visiting teachers, had become one of its characteristic institutions. Repertoires shifted by decade: Scandinavian material early, Balkan and Israeli dance strongly represented from the late 1950s onward, a widening of sources later.

Beside the hobby ran the living traditions: contra and English country dance in their revived forms, morris in its several regional styles, and country-specific dance written about by people who had grown up inside it rather than met it in a class. The distinction mattered to the participants, and much of what followed turned on it.

Much of the traffic was plainly logistical, and this was the function a newsgroup performed better than anything else then available: event and festival calendars, camp and workshop announcements, word of which teachers were touring and where, and the standing question of the travelling dancer — where can I dance next week in a city I do not know? The answers came from people who lived there.

The arguments recurred on a fixed cycle. Authenticity against adaptation: whether a dance shortened, tidied or standardised for a class on another continent is still the same dance, and what is owed to the community it was collected from. Recorded music against live musicians. The chain of transmission from village practice to staged ensemble to festival to weekly class, and how much each link alters what passes along it.

One constraint was purely technical and shaped the writing itself. Usenet was plain text: no diagrams, no notation staves, no film. Describing footwork had to be done in prose, counted bar by bar, in conventions improvised from printed notation and the syllabi handed out at camps. Disagreements about how to write a step down were frequently disagreements about the step.

Context

The scene ran on records. Recreational folk dance depended on obtainable recordings, and the repertoire was in practice the set of dances for which one existed. It was served by a handful of small specialist labels, several run by teachers who had the music recorded themselves, through 78s, LPs, cassettes and eventually CDs. Pressings were short and went out of print, and a dance whose record had vanished tended to drop out of class programmes; where to find a recording, and whether anything had been reissued, were a steady genre of traffic.

Within rec.* the nearest neighbour was rec.arts.dance, unmoderated and broad but weighted in practice towards ballroom, swing and other social forms; the border between them was mostly a matter of repertoire. The soc.culture.* groups for the countries much of the Balkan repertoire came from — soc.culture.bulgaria among them — sat a short crosspost away.

What ended the group was not a quarrel but a change of infrastructure. Dance-specific mailing lists took the specialists first; then club websites, web calendars and eventually social platforms absorbed the listings, which had been among the things the group did best. A calendar kept by hand in a shared public inbox cannot compete with one that updates itself. Traffic thinned through the 2000s, and what remains in the archive is a long run of a hobby explaining itself to itself — how dances were learned, argued over, written down and passed on.