Denver English Dance

08/13/2022

Dancers! Check this our!

11/20/2021

Dear Friends, Fans, Solabrators —
Sorry! Not gonna happen this year!

The Delta variant is surging in Colorado.
Even if we require vaccinations, masks make it hard to dance.
And hard to sing.
Impossible to eat or share a glass of wassail.
If everyone takes them off for the above reasons, it increases the possibility of spreading the virus.
Also, Chris Kermiet (that’s me, your host, M.C., and chief organizer,) suffered a stroke on November 6th. (Not debilitating, but definitely sapping my energy.)

Hate to break our 35-year run of Annual Winter Solabrations, but it’s cancelled.
I know many of you have made this a part of your Holiday Tradition, and have been returning year after year. I really hope we can start up again next year. Please make sure that we have an up-to-date e-mail mailto:[email protected]

And please have the most wonderful Solstice and Christmas you possibly can. Sorry — you’re on your own this year. Here’s a wassail recipe. Scroll down to the bottom of the Solabration home page, and you can relive last year’s Mummers Play and the Abbots Bromley. And check out our YouTube playlist.

http://wsolstice.org

09/15/2021

Several of you have asked when we'll be able to restart the English Country Dance. The short answer is that I don't know. I had high hopes for restarting the dance this fall, but those were dashed by the Delta variant. I'll try and keep you posted. In the meantime, here's an article which describes what we've all been missing - Collective Effervescence (from July 10th New York Times):

"We find our greatest bliss in moments of collective effervescence. It’s a concept coined in the early 20th century by the pioneering sociologist Émile Durkheim to describe the sense of energy and harmony people feel when they come together in a group around a shared purpose. Collective effervescence is the synchrony you feel when you slide into rhythm with strangers on a dance floor, colleagues in a brainstorming session, cousins at a religious service or teammates on a soccer field. And during this pandemic, it’s been largely absent from our lives.

Collective effervescence happens when joie de vivre spreads through a group. Before Covid, research showed that more than three-quarters of people found collective effervescence at least once a week and almost a third experienced it at least once a day. They felt it when they sang in choruses and ran in races, and in quieter moments of connection at coffee shops and in yoga classes."

We find our greatest bliss in moments of “collective effervescence.”