Hebridean Step Dances describes steps from nine Hebridean solo step dances, from the legacy of nineteenth-century dancing master, storyteller, and catechist Ewen MacLachlan who lived and worked in South Uist and Barra. A dance devised by Fearchar MacNeil is also included.
The legacy of Ewen MacLachlan’s dance repertoire remained with the people who kept dancing and passing them on. The steps remembered by the late Fearchar MacNeil of Barra, and John ‘Iain Ruadh’ MacLeod and Donald ‘Roidean’ MacDonald, both of South Uist, are presented in these pages.
Each of the nine dances are contextualised with notes on their style, associated music, and folklore: Scotch Blue Bonnets, Scotch Measure, Miss Forbes’ Farewell to Banff, Mac Iain Ghasda (Highland Laddie), Over the Waters, Tulloch Gorm, First of August, Flowers of Edinburgh, and, in addition, the solo jig Aberdonian Lassie, and Fearchar MacNeil’s dance Caisteal Chiosamul.
This book also traces how the dances were kept alive through local Island traditions, local teachings, and the ways observers of this tradition have notated and published their findings since the 1950s. The social and economic conditions of nineteenth-century South Uist and Barra are outlined to help contextualise the circumstances under which Ewen MacLachlan operated. A biography detailing what we know about Ewen attempts to sort the few facts we have from the many myths persisting about him. Further biographies of some Islanders who recalled these dances in the 1950s and newspaper entries from the Uist and Barra Games in the 1920s are also featured.
It is my sincere hope that this book helps keep these dances alive for future generations to enjoy.
Videos of the dances
An independent project presenting videos of these dances ties in with this publication. Links to these videos are provided within this book and here: Online video content is produced by Canadian dancer Sabra MacGillivray.
BOOK ORDER DETAILS:
This book was launched in Daliburgh, South Uist, Scotland on the 11 June 2019 by Frank McConnell.
Author: Mats Melin
General release as pdf book at €15.00 through this download purchase link.
An updated pdf as per 25 October 2021 is now on the download purchase link above. If you have a hardcopy or an earlier pdf and would like an update, please email me through this link.
The perfect bound hard copies are currently out of print.
REVIEWS of Hebridean Step Dancing
Most Scots would probably be surprised to learn that there exists a body of traditional dance material from the Hebrides that is quite unlike the modern versions of the Highland Fling or Gille Calum, which have become an emblem of ‘Scottishness’ the world over.
Mats Melin has been working on these dances since the 1980s (and I must declare an interest here as I taught him his very first Hebridean step dance, ‘The First of August’, in Stockholm at that time). This work is the result of over thirty years of research and dancing.
Counting Hebridean step dances is rather like trying to count the stones of Long Meg and her Daughters. However hard you try, you will never get the same answer twice! Here we are provided with the nine generally associated with Ewan MacLachlan, together with an extra, ‘Caisteal Chiosamul/Kisimul Castle’ composed by one of Melin’s main informants, Fearchar MacNeil. Each of the ten is dealt with in the same careful and critical detail. The notations are some of the best I have seen for this style of dance, although a good knowledge of Scottish notation systems is required. Nevertheless, the notations, combined with the chapter on style, should enable the enthusiast to recreate these exquisite dances.
Notations for these dances, more or less comprehensible, have been published several times over the last hundred years or so. What sets this volume apart is the quality of the social and historical detail, without which dance is merely the execution of choreography. The chapter on social and economic conditions on the Hebrides at a time when the dances were being taught sets the context in which dancing master Ewan MacLachlan (c.1799-1879) was teaching. Much has been written about this man, most of it fiction, and Melin has had to tread carefully over the broken glass of others’ misconceptions. He has done so with skill and scholarship.
It is now the twenty-first century and we have become accustomed to focus not so much on ‘getting it right’, a phrase much beloved of my (and Mats’s) dance instructors, but on tracing the history not only of the dances but also their development as part of, or sometimes in parallel with, the revival. This is of particular importance in connection with Hebridean solo dance, as these choreographies surfaced regularly during the twentieth century only to sink back into virtual oblivion within a few years. The book charts that progress, which almost uniquely allows us to place previously available information, and perhaps even our own performances, within a complete framework of choreographic and social development.
This is enhanced by the provision of extensive biographies of some of the main figures involved in Hebridean dance over the years, styled as the tradition bearers’. It has to be said that the choice is perhaps rather too restricted for my taste. The practice of ‘what if’ history is usually unproductive (unless one is writing pulp fiction), but one feels that without the efforts of dance scholar and collector Professor Tom Flett in the 1950s the world of Hebridean dance would have been a quite different place. Indeed, perhaps Dr Melin would not be studying it at all.
He surely needs greater recognition.
But this minor quibble should not deflect dancers and students of dance from acquiring this book. As one looks along one’s shelves, one realizes just how few serious studies of our dance traditions exist. This is a most valuable addition to that small set of volumes.
Chris Metherell, Felton, Northumberland – Published in Folk Music Journal, 2021