Old folk shuffle

>> Grey-haired enthusiasts keep international folk music kicking

by NOEMI LOPINTO

For over 20 summers, on Monday and Thursday nights, a small group of dancers have been meeting at Mount Royal's Beaver Lake and shaking it to beats from around the planet. They dance on the cobblestone floor, their arms around each other's shoulders, kicking and prancing, ducking and nodding until midnight.

They are not an unknown group of moon-worshippers, goddess-lovers or Christian revivalists. They are largely white, middle-class francophone suburbanites. Grey-haired matrons, in their favorite skirts and lucky boots, spin and move with knobby-kneed, pot-bellied men. Their age and dress notwithstanding, they are expert dancers.

An organization called the Association Montréalaise des arts et traditions populaires (AMATP) has been nurturing a love of folk dancing for 43 years, playing music from just about anywhere.

Jocelyne Vaillancourt, president of the AMATP, says the organization is run entirely by volunteers who have a passion for folk dancing. "You can't do it if you don't have an interest in it," she shouts over a Romanian melody. "All our services are free. It's a very convivial organization. We run the documentation centre and we drag the equipment up the mountain every week. People make requests and that makes the itinerary. We play songs from North Africa, the Middle East, all over Europe. Bulgaria is a fetish country right now, really popular. We love enlarging our repertoire."

The AMATP has an annual budget of $4,000 from the City of Montreal with which to maintain the documentation centre and pay their transportation costs. They have amassed a collection of over 2,000 music recordings. André Séguin has been the director of the documentation centre for 20 years. "The city backed out on us at a certain point," he says, "and we decided to create a place where people could store or copy folk music if they needed it. We are always looking for subsidies. We want to put all of our music on CDs, because a lot of it is still just old 78s."

The crowd is dancing to an Israeli classic, revolving in a giant circle, arms around each other's shoulders. Suddenly the men bob their balding heads, drop to their knees, as the women kick and twirl in unison. Then they resume the circle. One of the dancers, Denise, is over 80 years old. There have been, however, more "young" people--in their 20s and 30s--participating of late.

Diane, 49, has been coming since 1964. She wears the same bright red cowboy boots every week. "The floor is hard here," she says. "It would be nice if the city put down wood floors. In all the other big cities I've danced in, Stockholm and Quebec, there are beautiful areas where people can get together and dance outside. I love learning about other cultures through dance; it really opens the mind."

A cha-cha is announced, and the crowd goes wild. A tall, hefty woman take the hand of a small Asian man. They cut a rug. "Trying to save this music from extinction is my passion," says Séguin. "If we don't keep it somewhere it will die out. This music was composed in villages or by dance troupes specifically so people could have fun together. "

Dancing takes place Mon and Thurs, 8pm-11pm at the Chalet on Beaver Lake; on Aug 30 there will be a fullblown folkloric costume-fest, free