Angeline and William's Excellent Adventure: January 2010

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Two weeks ago, we packed ourselves up and went down to Olympia for the 3rd annual Sean-Nós Northwest festival. Sean-nós translates as 'old style', and it refers to Irish singing and dancing traditions that have been handed down for generations. It's my understanding that this style came from the peasantry and that the other old style of music - the formal bardic and harping traditions - have been almost entirely lost. At the moment, sean-nós (especially the dancing) is extremely popular in both Ireland and America. I speculate that this is somewhat of a backlash against Riverdance...

Anyway, the festival was lovely. There was a concert Friday night, which we missed, and classes all day Saturday, which I attended. I went to three singing classes (2 on Irish songs, one on English), a singing session, and a dance class. Then there was the afterparty - I think we played tunes for about 3 1/2 hours?

And now, an explanation of the videos below. There's an older video and a newer video for both dancing and singing; in both cases, the older one is from a recognized master of the form. The second dance video was taken at the Friday night concert at the festival this year. The second singing video features two people (the program host and the singer) that we met in Monaghan during our trip to Ireland in Dec. 2008. The first song has a bit of lilting at the beginning and is about a young man knocking at his lover's window as she (initially) refuses to let him in. The second song is "The Red-Haired Man's Wife" and covers the universal theme of unrequited love. Enjoy!

More information, as always, on Wikipedia.

Sean-Nós Dancing and Singing

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Settling in

This photo was supposed to go in the last post, and I don't want to delete it, so I'll just leave it here even though it doesn't have anything to do with what I want to write about.

We've been in our house for about 2 weeks now and have everything we need for basic day-to-day living, although some of it's borrowed from other people and will be returned when we retrieve our stuff from California and/or find something better. Currently we're planning to go get our stuff in April. William is doing some software contract work and I'm about to start working at the local YMCA teaching swimming - something I haven't done for about 10 years and that I'm looking forward to getting back to. Still looking for students, we've done a lot of networking in the music community here and hopefully that will pay off soon. We're both practicing as much as we can, cooking nearly every day, and getting to know our new home a little better. And, oddly enough, we're both starting to think that it would be nice to go camping soon, or maybe start planning another trip to Ireland...