Contributed
Tartan Pride’s “Celtic Night” held on Saturday, May 4 at the Cloverdale Catholic Parish Hall, was another fun-fuelled success.
The annual event, also known as “The Ceilidh”, Gaelic for an informal musical party, has been staged by the local dance team and Joan Murray’s School of Highland Dance for the last 16 years, and continues to grow in popularity.
Originally a fund-raiser to enable the local dancers to accept invitations to perform in such faraway places as Austria, Italy, Japan, Holland, Portugal, California, France, and of course, Scotland, the Celtic Night has since grown to become a combination concert, recital, and fun-night.
This year’s production was enthusiastically received by some 250 spectators who danced, laughed, and cheered their evening away for over four hours.
Performing guests included such international favourites as the Vancouver Police Pipe Band and Blackthorn. The police pipers and drummers will be leaving for Switzerland in July for their second invitational performance at the Basel International Tattoo, now the second-largest Tattoo in the world.
Blackthorn, on the other hand, is concentrating on bringing out more recordings of the group’s ever-expanding repertoire of Canadian and Celtic folk music.
Of course, the prominent theme of the evening was Highland dancing. Starting with enthusiastic performances by the youngest members of the Joan Murray Dance School, the show-part of the evening was interspersed with traditional and specially choreographed numbers by the Tartan Pride Dance Team.
True to Joan Murray’s reputation for innovative choreography, several unique numbers such as “Cotton-Eyed Joe” and “The Cake-Walk” kept the audience enthralled – torn between gasps of admiration and outbursts of laughter. As the old adage goes, “A great time was had by all.”
– by Jim McWilliams