Over the past few years, Fly Right has acquired quite a reputation as tea dance hosts. Indeed, we hosted Glasgow’s successful world record attempt for the largest tea dance in the world in 2008, and did it again in 2010 on 12 September! This year was Fly Right’s eigth year of presenting its tea dance show in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe – in fact, the company presented no less than 27 tea dances in the month of August, in various locations all over Scotland!
We’re also excited to announce that there will be a new tea dance opportunity, starting on 20 November 2011 at the Old Waverley Hotel on Princes Street, Edinburgh. We’ll put more details on the front of this blog and on our Facebook and LinkedIn pages – but suffice to say that there’ll be live music from a 6-piece band, some introductory tuition from Gary and Susan of Fly Right, AND a full afternoon tea with lashings of sarnies, cakes and tea or coffee.
So, tea dance culture has returned! More and more people at rediscovering the joy of dancing together with another person to the sophisticated strains of Palm Court music. Fly Right is keen to revive the less formal, original and more accessible ballroom dances from the 1900s to the 1920s, when social dance was becoming the leisure activity of choice for the masses.
Check out our website for a latest tea dance appearances… or, if you’d like us to help you recreate a traditional and appropriately-costumed dance event, please contact us for more details.
Just to finish, here is a delightful quotation taken from The Times in 1816. It’s not directly to do with tea dances, but it is an amusing insight into the establishment’s reaction to a new and shocking dance style – the Waltz!
“We remarked with pain that the indecent foreign dance called the Waltz was introduced (we believe for the first time) at the English court on Friday last … it is quite sufficient to cast one’s eyes on the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs and close compressure on the bodies in their dance, to see that it is indeed far removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females. So long as this obscene display was confined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think it deserving of notice; but now that it is attempted to be forced on the respectable classes of society by the civil examples of their superiors, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion.“
Oh dear!
