100 Years of RSCDS

Exactly 100 years ago 27 respectable Scots met in the Athenaeum in Glasgow to found the “Scottish Country Dance Society”. We look back at this time and also consider some challenges for the next hundred years!

The aims of this charitable organisation were:

• To practise and preserve country dances as danced in Scotland;
• To collect old books and pictures illustrative of Scottish dances; and
• To publish from time to time descriptions of country dances with diagrams and music in simple form at a moderate price.

The members of the young Society went about accomplishing these goals with panache: In 1924, the first book of dances was published and the first teachers were trained, in 1927 the first Summer School in St. Andrews took place. In 1945, the Society published, for the first time, a “modern” dance that had not either been observed somewhere in Scotland or else taken from an 18th or 19th-century book. In 1946, the future Queen Elizabeth II became the Society’s patron, and the first branches outside the United Kingdom were founded around that time. In 1951, King George VI bestowed the “Royal” moniker on the Scottish Country Dance Society, in 1963 the first book consisting exclusively of modern dances appeared (Book 22), 2016 saw the publication of the 50th “numbered” book of dances. Summer School, Winter School and Spring Fling are magnets for dancers from all over the world. In 2023, 100 years after its founding, the Society has around 160 branches worldwide, more than 300 affiliated dance groups and more than 8.000 members; there are likely several times as many more people practising SCD without Society membership.

A success story? Undoubtedly! In 1923 it seemed as if country dancing in Scotland would die out or at least withdraw into a niche of historic curiosities. It is the accomplishment of the Society around Ysobel Stewart of Fasnacloich and Jean Milligan that “Scottish” country dancing is now a form of dance that is enjoyed worldwide – even though the name didn’t even exist in the beginning. The SCDS was all about “country dances as danced in Scotland”, and at the time it was far from ascribing to them a special “Scottish” character; that somehow crept in later, and today we’re talking about “Scottish” country dancing as a matter of course that probably wouldn’t have passed the lips of the SCDS’s founders.

Which is not to say that the Society’s activities were completely uncontroversial even in Scotland. The rigorous standardisation of the dances, the soft shoes and the introduction of a technique vaguely influenced by ballet which was completely alien to those who were still actively practising the dances caused wide disapproval among people who wanted to retain the tradition as they knew it (even if that tradition seemed degenerate to the Society’s founders). With hindsight, though, one must admit that what was, in Scotland, widely considered galumphing roughshod across the country’s cultural heritage, also was exactly what made SCD attractive on the world stage (and continues to do so), where by necessity it is in competition with other types of dance (or leisure activities in general). In SCD we have a form of dancing which exudes strength and elegance, can be learned with reasonable effort, allows for infinite variation and therefore never becomes dull, brings together people of all ages, and allows us, thanks to its standardised technique and uniform repertoire of formations and dances, to dance together no matter where we are or where we come from. There is nothing else like it, and we have to thank Mrs Stewart, Miss Milligan, and their fellow campaigners for this.

In particular we must point out that, while the transformation of country dancing into its modern form, SCD, originated in Scotland, Scottish country dancing as such has now become an international phenomenon. No longer is it confined to the inhabitants of Scotland or people of Scottish descent – in Germany, Russia, Japan, in Africa or South America we’re “dancing Scottish” even as non-Scots, not to preserve our own (or Scottish?) cultural heritage or because there is nothing else to do in our crofters’ hovels, but simply because we enjoy the movement, the music, the challenge and the social interaction that SCD consists of. We invent new dances and formations and compose music, we put on balls, dance workshops, and festivals, publish dance books and record dance music, all without asking Scotland for approval. And that is completely appropriate because in the 21st century, SCD belongs to us just as much as it does to the Scots.

So what’s in store for the Society? Its most obvious problem is membership depletion. When I joined the Society in the early 1990s, it had around 25.000 members – today its membership has dwindled to around 8.000 and continues downward. Why is that? On the one hand, most members (used to) live in the United Kingdom, where the average age of the SCD community is quite high and more and more members tend to be lost for “biological” reasons, while comparatively fewer young dancers join. On the other hand, there are many dancers worldwide who simply have no motive to join the Society. It usually is no problem, even so, to get as much dancing in as one might want, and unless one wants to pursue SCD teaching qualifications or wants to engage in Society governance there is no hard requirement to join. To many, two issues of a glossy magazine per year is not proper value for their membership dues. (Traditionally one must join the Society when one becomes a member of a branch; some branches found this duty so onerous that they downgraded themselves to affiliated groups to evade it.) Many dancers, however, ignore the fact that the Society really does a lot for them: Most of us dance, in groups whose teachers have been trained by the Society, dances published by the Society to music produced by the Society. The Teaching Certificate and the Society’s publications are instrumental for SCD being globally standardised – so whoever travels from Germany to the USA, Japan, or Australia for dancing is indebted to the Society for the fact that they can join in immediately. Therefore we should be members of the Society, not because we expect a direct personal benefit for our membership dues, but because this supports the community as a whole. At the end of the day, the Society is a victim of its own success – thanks to its activities, SCD is more popular than ever, but that does not result in a rising number of members. The Society must work on its “message”, but it is also upon all of us, if we’re members, to inspire others to join, and if we’re not, to ask ourselves why we don’t. Membership depletion is an existential problem for the Society since, in theory, the membership dues as its only (mostly) predictable source of income must cover its running costs, including 12 Coates Crescent and the staff working there. No wonder the dues keep going up …

With Society membership comes influence – albeit only indirectly. The destiny of the Society is controlled by its “annual general meeting” (AGM), and it is not its members who make decisions there but its branches, with a number of votes per branch that depends on the number of its members. Approximately half of the Society’s branches are in the United Kingdom, and so it does not come as a surprise that much in RSCDS governance is seen through British glasses – even though the Society, as we’ve seen, has for the longest time been an international affair! Unfortunately, all of Germany has fewer votes (four) in the AGM than, for example, Glasgow branch, even though it is safe to assume that there are many more dancers in Germany than in Glasgow. This is mainly a design fault of the Central Germany branch, which (in spite of its name) stands for all of Germany; if instead of one outsize branch we had, say, five smaller local branches, more like Scotland, the German SCD community would be entitled to more than double the votes than we have today, because every branch, however small, automatically gets two votes. But it also points to a general imbalance in the distribution of RSCDS branches that is structually difficult to fix.

If the Society claims to speak for the worldwide SCD community, it must become more flexible and international in its own setup. Currently, all important decisions for the worldwide RSCDS are made predominantly by Scots in Scotland – perhaps obviously so, given that the Society as an organisation is based in Scotland, but by no means obligatory –, and it is not surprising that the situation in Scotland tends to be more in the focus of the “worldwide” headquarters than that in Italy, Canada, or New Zealand. If we expect dancers in Australia or Japan to take care of their local issues, the same should apply to Scotland, but RSCDS headquarters in Edinburgh is in charge of Scotland and the whole world at the same time. A cleaner separation would be desirable here. In addition, the conference table in 12 Coates Crescent plays an inappropriately large role. During my tenure as convenor of the Membership Services Committee I led what was probably the most internationally staffed committee the Society ever had, but it still proved impossible to change the committee’s mode of working, on a sustainable basis, from one focused on personal meetings according to a calendar that was convenient for Scots to a “virtual” approach where most of the work is done outside actual meetings, via e-mail and other Internet-based resources such as instant-messaging services and wikis, so nobody must participate, every few months, in a video conference that for them goes from 2am to 6am. It is no wonder that RSCDS committees consist mostly of Scots, because the current arrangement is extremely inconvenient for volunteers from America or Australasia who live in the wrong time zone and are utterly unable to attend meetings in person. Of course, as long as most committee members live a stone’s throw away from Edinburgh there is no obvious reason to change anything about these structures. It is a Catch-22 situation.

Which is not to say that there aren’t also positive developments. Summer School in St. Andrews and Winter School in Pitlochry seem to be fixed institutions, but at least the “Spring Fling” happens in a different location every year – nowadays even in continental Europe and overseas. Why doesn’t that also work for the “Autumn Gathering”, the weekend containing the AGM, which could just as well take place in Paris, Toronto, or Perth, Australia as in Glasgow or Perth, Scotland? Tutors and examiners fo the Teaching Certificate now exist outwith Scotland, even though Summer School classes in St. Andrews still appear to be standard for candidates from Europe. A good idea in principle is the “Core Training for Instructors” (CTI), which as a lower-level offering for teachers can be done without any in-presence classes at all, with mentoring and assessment that is based on online chat and video recordings. Here, though, we missed the chance of bringing CTI and the Teaching Certificate closer together, for example by adapting the existing Unit 3 – the first part of the teaching-practice section of the Certificate – to optionally allow distance learning and defining CTI as equivalent to a combination of Unit 1, Unit 3 and (something like) Unit 4. This would exploit obvious synergies, avoid duplication, and simplify obtaining the Teaching Certificate for alumni and alumnae of the CTI. German candidates might have to travel to St Andrews for two weeks just once instead of twice like today. We have been talking about qualification offerings beyond the Teaching Certificate for many years, but tangible results beyond a beefed-up “tutors’ course” still remain to be seen.

In the first hundred years of its existence, the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society has accomplished many things. SCD has been saved and is more popular throughout the world than ever – the fact that today there are more than 20.000 dances, of which fewer than 5% have been published by the RSCDS, speaks volumes about the creativity and vibrance of the community. But there is still a lot to do if the RSCDS wants to stay true to its aspiration of being the global home of SCD, rather than mostly a Scottish organisation where the rest of the world is graciously allowed to tag along. We’re looking forward to the next hundred years!

Text: Anselm Lingnau