Posted by Steve Bull
on December 7, 2007, 10:54 pm
172.200.79.27
I’ve been following these threads with great interest over the last few days since unless some heroes appear out of the mist to boost the committee of Cajun UK (in particular for booking the bands) our Cajun and Zydeco experience will be limited to chasing around over Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire to see the handful of bands who regularly gig here.
There has been a lot of discussion in these threads over publicity and image in Cajun and Zydeco. Cajun UK surely needs to encourage just a handful of regulars who will tip the financial balance in Cajun UK’s favour.
I have recently met people who remember the Swamp Club. One was at a Salsa dance class and the other was at a Country and Western dance class. Perhaps two sets of flyers could be produced, one aimed at dance class venues and another emphasising the music.
In Louisiana, the dances take place in halls even more basic than our Darley Abbey where couples dance under strip lights, drink beer sold in cans from a table, and eat Cajun food sold in polystyrene containers. Apart from the heat and the mosquitoes, the Cajun UK experience is pretty accurate. To do it in any other way would just not be true to the genre. There aren’t very many younger people in the audiences either; the age profile is broadly similar to that in the UK. One difference though is that more musicians go to each other’s gigs and sit in, making for a longer set. Over here the musicians don’t seem to go to see other bands so much, and it really would improve the atmosphere and support the scene if they did.
I am in favour of the dance workshops. I remember the old Swamp Club where some of the dancers used to go along in shorts with several changes of T shirt and a towel, overdoing the jitterbug and turning it into an athletic work out which made it a closed book for a lot of people, myself included. Cajun and Zydeco are both tricky to get into for the novice, with the French language in the former and the difficult to master beat in the latter. It was the dance workshops which got me back into Cajun and Zydeco about three years ago.
There is definitely a stigma in the UK about dancing in couples. In the UK it went into a steep decline in the sixties with the rise of pop. Dancing in a ballroom hold became associated with the older generation. This problem did not occur in the USA because of Country and Western which has a tradition of partner dancing.
One final point – outside this forum it has been commented that the Cajun UK people haven’t been very forthcoming in this forum. Perhaps they do not go on-line or do so quite rarely.
I don’t think that there needs to be big changes in Cajun UK. It just needs more people to help out in organising and running events, and more supporters.
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