We’re so excited to sing songs and do dances from Western Europe this season, so LET’S DIVE IN with RIVERDANCE!
The Irish dancing phenomenon Riverdance is a phenomenon because, well, watch this video — it really is phenomenal. “Irish dancing” is a broad term that covers a variety of dances from all over the “Emerald Isle,” many of which developed as a mix of French quadrille and English country dances. Riverdance rivets us with Irish step dancing, which thrills us with a combination of precision and exuberance. Oh yes, we start here.
Tag Archives | Western Europe
From Spain to Sweden, Greenland to Greece
Welcome! This the first day of the first week of the next amazing season of All Around This World’s online class. Today we start our journey Western Europe and the Nordic Countries, a region of the world that has the distinction of being home to the most popular music-makers of all time, from the almost super-human classical composers Beethoven, Bach and Mozart to the (arguably?) equally brilliant Lennon and McCartney. From Spain to Sweden, Greenland to Greece — yes, we’ll talk about why Greece counts for us as “West” — we will clap our hands, stomp our feet and have one heckuva good time. Let’s go!
Saying Goodbye to Europe (but not in the “Brexit” sort of way)
We got there! Over the last three months you, your kids and I, together, have traveled from one end of Western Europe to the other, making music with everyone from Greenlandic poets to Spanish anti-Fascists, from headbanging Germans to seafaring French, from soul-searching Greeks to frolicking Swedes. Along the way we were bitten by poisonous spiders, toppled the French monarchy, made fun of our friends in ancient Maltese and ate really stinky fish. We may have jumped into this season thinking we knew a lot about European music, but then we realized that what we really knew was just a couple songs by the Rolling Stones. We never realized the depth and diversity of European music and the so many things the so many musical styles say about the so many fascinating groups of people there.
This week we’ll bounce around the region just a bit more, singing songs from here and there, remembering, fondly, our days in Europe’s west.
