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A NEW PODCAST ABOUT DANCE AND MUSIC TRADITIONS. In the Tradical Podcast, dancer, fiddler, and ethnochoreologist Danielle Enblom, takes audiences on a journey across Western Europe, North America, and the Caribbean exploring the rich and interrelated dance and music traditions from long ago, and still practiced to this day. Many of the dance forms are percussive, like Irish dance, and social, like American square dance. Each dance form has a corresponding musical tradition, often (but not always) featuring the fiddle. These dance and music forms reach from baroque France to the outer Hebrides; from the Vaudville stage to the North Woods; from Quebec to Appalachia; and the Caribbean to New York. Folks gathering at dirt crossroads, in royal halls, emptied barns, internment camps, kitchens, pubs, clubs, and dance halls, these traditions have been pastimes for all reaches of society for centuries. Each locality having its own unique practices, and each being shaped by others through migration (forced and voluntary), pop culture, media, and colonialism. From masters, stewards, and innovators, to researchers and historians, Danielle sits down with experts from all over the world to learn about the whos, the whats, the hows, and the whys. Revealing origins and relationships between dance, music, culture, and history.

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What do Bach, Haiti, and Riverdance have in common? More than you know!

These tunes were made for dancin...

Much of the traditional music of Ireland, Scotland, England, Canada and the States began as dance music. Tap was the original percussion in Jazz. In the bebop era, the drumset took over changing the relationship between dancer and musician. While Irish music is now enjoyed on its own with accompaniment and arrangements, the primary tunes in the Irish repertoire are dances - jigs, reels, hornpipes, barndances, mazurkas, highlands, waltzes, polkas, slides... this is the same in Baroque-era classical music. Allemands were for the dance called the allemand, minuets for minuets, gavottes for gavottes, and so on. It's difficult to characterize the dance and music types explored in this podcast in one fell swoop, but generally, you could say that there is a specific relationship between dance steps or forms and the tunes that go along with them, they originate in the North Atlantic, even the square dance forms in the Caribbean have roots in the North Atlantic. Many but not all of them include solo dance forms that create percussion. Lot's of them have a social dance in the form of a square. And most of them feature the fiddle as a central music maker... 

In Baroque France, the nobility held dance and music with the utmost esteem...

Lords, ladies, kings and queens danced gavottes, gigues, hornpipes, and minuets at decadent and refined balls to music composed to the likes of Bach and Telemann. Versions of these dances influenced the pop culture throughout Europe and French and English colonies.

Clear the kitchen and put the kettle on...

For decades, traditional musicians and dancers in Ireland, Scotland, and North America have enjoyed a good kitchen session. In the old days you might have found a fiddler in the corner, playing tunes for set or square dances late into the night. In Quebec some folks sprinkled cornmeal on the floor so the dancers could glide through their sets. In Ireland, house dances were held in secret for a time, when the Church and government banned unsanctioned dance gatherings for fear of things getting too... rowdy... Nowadays you're most likely to find kitchen sessions filled with fiddles, and based on the locations flutes, accordions, 4 or 5-sting banjos, guitars, pianos, and if you're lucky a few steps thrown in. 

A show with Irish dancers in long lines battering complex rhythms took the world by storm...

Ireland's winning contribution to the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest set the stage for the traveling dance shows which would entertain and inspire audiences around the world and employ hundreds of Irish step dancers. The music and dancing in the show emerged from a long history peppered with the development of the itinerant Irish dance masters; the fight for Irish freedom and the Gaelic Revival; and the origination of Irish ensemble music in Sean O'Riada's Ceoltóirí Cualann, and later the Chieftans.