The Royal Scottish Country Dance Society (RSCDS), was founded on 28 November 1923 as the Scottish Country Dance Society by Jean Milligan and Ysobel Stewart of Fasnacloich, who wanted to preserve

country dancing A country dance is any of a very large number of social dances of a type that originated in England in the British Isles; it is the repeated execution of a predefined sequence of figures, carefully designed to fit a fixed length of music, perfo ...

as performed in

Scotland Scotland is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It contains nearly one-third of the United Kingdom's land area, consisting of the northern part of the island of Great Britain and more than 790 adjac ...

, country dancing having fallen into disuse after the influx of continental ballroom dances such as the

waltz The waltz ( , meaning "to roll or revolve") is a ballroom dance, ballroom and folk dance, in triple (3/4 time, time), performed primarily in closed position. Along with the ländler and allemande, the waltz was sometimes referred to by the ...

quadrille The quadrille is a dance that was fashionable in late 18th- and 19th-century Europe and its colonies. The quadrille consists of a chain of four to six ''Contra dance, contredanses''. Latterly the quadrille was frequently danced to a medley of ope ...

s and, later on, American-style dances like the

One-step The One-Step was a ballroom dance popular in social dancing at the beginning of the 20th century.Claude Conyers. 'One-step', in ''Grove Music Online'' (2001) Troy Kinney writes that One-Step originated from the Turkey Trot dance, with all man ...

foxtrot The foxtrot is a smooth, progressive dance characterized by long, continuous flowing movements across the dance floor. It is danced to big band (usually vocal) music. The dance is similar in its look to waltz, although the rhythm is in a time ...

. (The SCDS did not become the RSCDS until 1951.) The RSCDS collected dances from living memory as well as from old (17-19c.) manuscripts and republished them in a series of books. Most of these dances needed some interpretation, and the dance style itself underwent serious standardisation, becoming much more balletic instead of the easy-going style that was the norm in the early 20th century, and which the RSCDS's founders considered sloppy and untraditional. After some argument, in the late 1940s the RSCDS also started publishing newly devised dances. Today the RSCDS numbers some 11,000 members all over the world, served from the headquarters in

Edinburgh Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 Council areas of Scotland, council areas. The city is located in southeast Scotland and is bounded to the north by the Firth of Forth and to the south by the Pentland Hills. Edinburgh ...

, and the continuous well-being of the

Scottish country dance Scottish country dance (SCD) is the distinctively Scottish form of country dance, itself a form of social dance involving groups of couples of dancers tracing progressive patterns. A dance consists of a sequence of figures. These dances are ...

scene is largely due to the efforts of the Society. The RSCDS offers teacher training and holds an annual summer school in

St Andrews St Andrews (; ; , pronounced ʰʲɪʎˈrˠiː.ɪɲ is a town on the east coast of Fife in Scotland, southeast of Dundee and northeast of Edinburgh. St Andrews had a recorded population of 16,800 , making it Fife's fourth-largest settleme ...

Fife Fife ( , ; ; ) is a council areas of Scotland, council area and lieutenancy areas of Scotland, lieutenancy area in Scotland. A peninsula, it is bordered by the Firth of Tay to the north, the North Sea to the east, the Firth of Forth to the s ...

for four weeks in July and August. In addition to the annual summer school, the RSCDS offers a winter school in February and a youth orientated Spring Fling in April, which is held in the UK and Europe respectively.

References

External links

Official websiteUniversity of St Andrews Celtic Society

References

External links

See also