Dance Legacies of Scotland

Mats Melin is a lecturer at University of Limerick, Ireland. He has worked and performed extensively in Angus, Sutherland, the Scottish Highlands, the Hebrides, Orkney, and Shetland, promoting Scottish traditional dance in schools and communities.Jennifer Schoonover is a dancer and choreographer. She teaches movement principles, improvisation, dance pedagogy, and dance modalities including Cape Breton Step, Ceilidh, Highland, and Scottish Country dancing.

''This important and timely publication addresses intriguing and long-unanswered questions concerninghistorical and recent practices of percussive stepdancing in Scotland. Co-authors Mats Melin and Jennifer Schoonover possess excellent credentials to pursue and interrogate legacies of dancing in Scotland. As scholar practitioners with long and extensive experience of Scottish dance forms, they bring complementary knowledge and authority to the subject. Details of embodied memories of step-dancing drawn from Mats Melin’s fieldwork conducted in Scotland from the 1980s to 2016 reveal vestiges of a once familiar practice that was submerged and often dismissed. In summary, this is an important contribution to dance scholarship and an accessible text for those interested in percussive dancing and in Scottish culture and history.'' Folk Music Journal, Theresa Jill Buckland,University of Roehampton, London

• Introduction, 1. ‘I wish I had it in my power to describe to you’: introductory observations on Step dance and its place in Scotland, 2. From regional variations to standardisation of vernacular dance, 3. Na brògan dannsaidh/The dancing shoes: foot anatomy, footwear, and body posture, 4. Gaelic references and continental European connections, 5. From Hornpipes to High Dances: historical terms and overlapping usage, 6. Hyland step forward: eighteenth-century accounts, 7. A few more flings and shuffles: nineteenth-century accounts, 1800–1839, 8. Aberdeenshire to the Hebrides: nineteenth-century accounts, 1840–1899, 9. Breakdown: twentieth-century accounts, 10. An t-Seann Dùthaich: dancing in the Scottish diaspora, 11. First-hand Step dance encounters and recollections in Scotland from the 1980s to 2016 collected by Mats Melin, 12. Weaving the steps to the music, 13. Echoes and reflections