Postie's Jig

Tonight I had the absolute delight of introducing some friends to Scottish dancing!  My favorite Scottish dance is the Postie’s Jig so that’s what I taught them.

Technically we should have had 4 guys and 4 ladies but we only had 3 willing male participants.  So another woman had to take the place of a guy.  That usually works out easily when everyone is familiar with the dance.  But when you’re just learning the steps and turns, it can be confusing to remember who is a guy and who is a girl.  So it proved to be quite entertaining!

We walked through the dance a number of times before we added any music to it.  At first it was a bit challenging to instruct everyone on what they needed to do at the same time.  When you have 4 corners casting off at the same time, it’s hard for them to understand that they’re really just doing mirror images of each other since it looks to them like they’re all going in different directions.  And trying to explain the half figure 8s, bridges (arches), and corner turns all seems chaotic at first until they see the very logical pattern as it develops.

Once they started seeing it all come together (and saw a demo on youtube), the pace really picked up and I could tell they were enjoying themselves.  I didn’t want to start with the youtube demo because I was afraid it would look overwhelming to them before even giving it a chance.  Since I started with a walkthrough, it was much easier to point out what was happening when they actually saw the demo later.  After that we were able to add the music and actually dance!  Actually I still did the calling out and prompting but I loved seeing the enthusiasm.

This experience took me way back to the days of extended curfew and breathless dancing.  It really was quite the workout but so much fun!  Some of the guys were great at spinning us around too – to the point when we were almost airborne sometimes!  Such wonderful memories!  I really can’t wait to do this again if I can get 8 willing participants!