Have you swayed to Celtic tunes?

Remember James Cameron’s eleven academy award winning movie, Titanic. This critically acclaimed movie carried a scene where Leonardo Dicaprio takes Kate Winslet to a much livelier party with an impromptu dance going on! Ever wonder what form of dance that is or what it is called?

Ceili (meaning party), a traditional Gaelic social dance, originated in Ireland and Scotland, and is now common throughout the Celtic Diaspora. It is often called a figure dance because of the pattern that the dancers make. There are a few basic steps and each dance combines these steps in different ways. The principle dance forms are jigs and reels, involving a certain number of steps, generally in three or sevens. Some dances are performed, with a partner, in circles, some in lines and some in groups of three or four.

I was so eager to learn this form of dance. I and my friends joined a dance school which conducted a ten day class. At the beginning of the ceili, the caller (dance instructor) names the dance and invites volunteers from the group to demonstrate the reel or the jig. The dancers are then requested to invite a partner up to dance. We danced to the ‘Haymakers’(jig), ‘Siege of Ennis’ and other progressive dances like ‘lonsi na hisi Ballai Luimni’, Which is step hop 1 2 3 (jig). We thoroughly enjoyed this form of dance. The ten dance was the most enjoyable recent moment in my life.