![]() ![]() Last year a woman and her ten-year-old twin daughters came from Pangnirtung, Baffin Island, mom to fiddle and twins to step dance. The camp regularly reaches capacity, drawing students from throughout North America – Alaska, California, Tennessee, Vancouver – as well as England. “The first year we had about thirty students, the next year seventy and then one hundred and ten, so we have had to cap it at one hundred,” Bill says. I just love the music.”īill Elliott: “We take absolute beginners …by the end of the week they’re playing a tune.” Photo by Pete Paterson.Īs a regular at contests throughout southern Ontario, Bill got to know the competitors personally, and it was their desire to have a place where they could improve their techniques and learn new steps that prompted him to establish the Orangeville camp. Of Irish/Scottish descent, Bill grew up watching Don Messer’s Jubilee, CBC television’s hugely popular fiddle and dance program of the 1960s.Īlthough he neither plays fiddle nor dances, Bill says, “I’ve been going to fiddle and step dancing events for almost forty years. “My dad was one of the original organizers of the Bobcaygeon fiddle contest,” he says. Starting with a dozen or so students, Chanda taught wherever space was available – at the Legion, the curling club, and in the United Church basement.īill, who moved to Orangeville in 1974, is a native of Bobcaygeon and came by his love of fiddling and step dancing naturally. Realizing the potential for the growing step dance community, Bill asked if she would commute to Orangeville to teach on Saturdays. In 1995, after two successful years as a camp instructor, Chanda found her young step dancers were eager to continue training throughout the year. She was lured here by Bill Elliott, who founded the Orangeville Fiddle and Step Dance Camp in 1993 and who Chanda says is “largely responsible for keeping fiddling and step dancing alive in this area.” Bill had seen Chanda compete and asked her to teach at the summer camp while she was attending the University of Waterloo. With a performance record that includes an impressive string of awards, including two Canadian championships, Chanda has now settled her family and career in Orangeville. And by age fourteen, she had begun teaching, a love that continues today. By the time she was twelve, Chanda was ready to create her own routines and individuality, something encouraged in step dancing. “Buster taught me for four years and also taught Debbie Reid, who was later my teacher for four years, so I learned the style right from the source,” says Chanda. “I was immediately hooked.”īuster Brown (later inducted into the Ottawa Valley Country Music Hall of Fame along with his wife, Pauline) learned his first steps from Donnie Gilchrist – the man credited with blending the old-country traditional step dance varieties he had witnessed growing up in the Ottawa Valley lumber camps to create the Ottawa Valley Step Dance style. “It was the sound of the taps that immediately appealed to me,” says Chanda, now 33, recalling the moment she saw stepper Buster Brown teaching a class in her Ottawa Valley hometown of Cobden, Ontario in 1978. Who can resist the finger-snapping, foot-tapping appeal of a down-home fiddler, especially when paired with a step dancer’s flying footwork? Certainly not four-year-old Chanda Gibson. ![]() “The rhythm and music is in their blood,” says Chanda of her three children. Step dancer Chanda Gibson accompanies her four-year-old son Xavier. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |