Folk Dancing at Antioch

Folk Dancing in Red Square Friday night folk dances in the ’60s at Antioch were by far the most popular single weekly social event on Antioch campus. People disagreed about a lot, but almost everyone liked folk dancing, and the weekly Red Square Folk Dances were attended by hundreds: advanced dancers, beginning dancers, and onlookers. We danced around the tree, which grew in the center of Red Square and was outfitted with floodlights and a single loud speaker.

Antioch Community Government sponsored the dances and owned the phonograph record collection used, DJ style, to program the evening’s dances. Typically we did 60 different dances, never repeating a single dance. A blackboard equipped with several pieces of chalk was always part of the folk dance set up, and people quickly filled it up with requests. The most popular single dance was The Salty Dog Rag, a partner dance done to music sung by Rod Foley (Pat Boone’s father-in-law), which featured fiddle music and a hokey country melody. Other popular dances included Mayim, an Israeli circle dance traditionally taught in the early 60s to all freshmen during orientation activities, along with Miserlou, a Greek line dance. U.S. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton ’60 mentions Antioch folk dancing in her recent biography, Fire in My Soul (2002).

During the ’60s, Antiochians often attended folk dances held by groups in large cities during co-op jobs. New York City, Chicago, the San Francisco Bay area, and Washington, DC, all had several groups each, and co-oping Antiochians were famous in folk dance circles all across the country as unusually skilled folk dancers. They were always welcomed enthusiastically at big city folk dances. Antiochians sometimes taught folk dances popular at Antioch at these off-campus dance locations.

People learned to folk dance at Antioch during orientation sessions; during Saturday afternoon, two-hour, folk dance workshops sponsored by Community Government; and during Physical Education classes (these classes were very popular, and difficult to get into). In the course of each Friday night event (held on Red Square in warm weather and in the Gym during cold weather), there were three or four advanced dances performed, including a Russian partner dance called Yablotchka, meaning “Little Apple,” and a German partner dance, astonishing for its intricacy, called Ziller Teller Laendler.

On the other end of the spectrum were a half a dozen simple but beautiful dances almost everyone knew, most of them line dances. On warm spring and summer evenings, literally hundreds of students would join in these dances, which formed concentric circles around the Red Square tree and sometimes spilled off the Square due to such large numbers of dancers. Folk dancing was led each quarter by a single person who acted both as Friday Night Dance DJ and as teacher during orientation and during Saturday Folk Dance Workshops. Names of Folk Dance Leaders included Steve Edison ’60, Stan Isaacs ’62, Dave Sommer ’63, Ernie Brody ’64, Mark Post ’66, and Andy O’Hare ’66. I led in 1964-1965.

Folk dancing at Antioch is no longer the wildly popular mass phenomenon it was in the ’60s. The Community Government Folk Dance phonograph record collection still exists, and is stored on campus but almost never used. During the 1999 Antioch Alumni Reunion, which I attended, I obtained permission to tape about 60 of the dance music records (mostly 78 RPM phonograph records) I used to include during Friday night dances. I also danced on Red Square with about a half dozen other attendees as about 30 onlookers watched. The dance was programmed by one of the still existing folk dance enthusiasts who live in Yellow Springs, and hold monthly folk dances seldom attended by Antioch students.

Folk dances at Antioch were wonderful, even magical experiences. No one who ever saw them or joined in will ever forget them. Perhaps, someday, folk dancing will return to Antioch as a weekly event, and resume its popularity of decades past.

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