LEWISTON — The calls were fast, the dancing happy.
“Pass your partner, give them a wink!”
“To the left, to the left and all the way back! I want them to hear you in Quebec!”
With fiddlers, an accordion and Cindy Larock as teacher, caller and spoon player, the Lewiston Public Library on Saturday hosted a Spring Fling that Larock jokingly referred to as a “prom” for her just-wrapped Franco folk dancing class.
It’s the first time she’d offered the class through the University of Southern Maine’s Lewiston-Auburn College’s Senior College. Designed as a throw-back to the “kitchen parties” of the past century, she taught French Canadian contradances and quadrilles.
“You’d have these big extended families,” Larock said. “When they got together for events, holidays, special occasions, there would be lots of drinking and singing and food, and someone would pull out a fiddle, and usually an accordion, and the dancing would just sort of naturally ensue.”
Some of her dozen students learned the moves for the first time. Others had “just vague memories of doing this when they were much younger,” she said. “It’s a matter of reclaiming Lewiston’s Franco heritage.”
Barbara Jabaut of Durham said she’d signed up because she’d never contradanced before.
“Always with Senior College, you get to meet new people,” she said. “It gets you involved. There’s no test to it. I taught as a teacher for 28 years — I love that you come out and it’s just fun.”
Aliette Couturier of Lewiston said she grew up in Augusta, but her family would regularly head to Canada to visit family growing up. She’d picked up the dances then and acted as a class assistant.
“It was very interesting to hear each one say their experience from when they were younger,” she said.
On Saturday, The Maine Folque Co-op provided the tunes as 10 to 12 people danced and just as many circled the dance floor to watch.
Joshua White, 15, of Auburn, on guitar, said he liked the upbeat sound of the music.
“It’s nice keeping the tradition alive and the music alive,” he said. “We need the younger generation like me to start picking it up,” to make sure it sticks around.
Larock’s class was supported through a $1,000 grant from the Maine Arts Commission’s new Creative Aging Program. She hopes to teach it again next year.
kskelton@sunjournal.com
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