'I've done folk dancing, and in my opinion, that's baloney. We learned to do certain moves to a certain melody. Playing a B part where the repeat of A has alwsys been would lead to so much confusion the dance would fall apart.'

Hi Leenia - I wonder whether the type of folk dance that you are talking about may be rather different to the type of thing Mo is describing? I've a lot of experience of playing for and dancing at ceilidhs, and also of learning and performing morris. IMHO although to me as a dancer it upsets me greatly to dance across the music, lots of people seem totally unaware. Especially those who haven't ever done any folk dance at all before. They tend to follow the callers instructions and pretty much ignore the music or, as mentioned above, dance to the beats but ignore the phrases. To me, that is very different to learning dances for performance (morris, in my case, but the same probably applies for perfoming country country dances), where the dance and the tune are interlinked and it is much harder if not impossible to do the dance properly if the music doesn't fit. Not to mention the fact that for a lot of performance type dance, you'd learn a particular dance to a particular tune and would only ever do the two together, whereas at ceilidhs for many/most dances a caller will just ask for e.g. a 48 bar jig and the band will pick one from their repertoire, so the dance will happen to different tunes at different events depending on the band.