Romania:
Bulgaria:
Greece:
Russia:
Yugoslavia:
Israel:
We started planning the course this year with the fear that our numbers would be very much reduced because of the high fee which we had to charge as a result of the increased charges made by the University. In the event our fears proved groundless, and with about 90 participants we had one of our largest courses. Aili Eistrat taught us Estonian - and many of you can guess just how successful her classes were - and Kristina Michael took us through a variety of Russian dances, including Georgian and Ukrainian, and it was nice once again to dance Moonshine, which was in our repertoire nearly thirty years ago when we used to dance in Pont Street! The great disappointment was that Tita Sever, our guest teacher from Rumania, had to go into hospital a fortnight before the course started, and despite telephone calls and cables to Bucharest, we were unable to get a replacement from Rumania. However, Vic Knivett, Brian Dowsett and Frances Horrocks rallied round nobly and gave us a very interesting programme of dances from Rumania, Bulgaria and the Balkans respectively. It was a magnificent effort on their behalf, at such short notice, too.
Three people who are an essential ingredient to any Swansea course now played their usual parts. Caroline Thomas and Donald Campbell provided our music and will be making recordings for us of the dances we learned; they both worked very hard and provided an excellent background to the classes. Finally, Simon Guest once again ran all the evening dances and the party on the last evening in addition to the behind-the-scenes work with which he was involved. It is no rest cure organising 3 or 4 hours of dancing each evening, after a hard day of classes.
This year the weather was magnificent - not a drop of rain and almost continuous sunshine. Most people made the most of the weather and we had a coach outing on each of the six free afternoons to a different bay each time.
