ABOUT BRUCE

Bruce Hamilton is a thoughtful and energetic teacher of English and (formerly) Scottish country dancing. He began Scottish dancing in college in 1967 and immediately fell in love with it, took up teaching in the early 1970s, and was a founding teacher of the San Diego Branch of the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society. He is particularly fond of its simultaneous power and elegance, and also its music.

Bruce also loves and teaches English dance—country (commonly known as ECD, English Country Dance), morris, and sword. He has become one of the country’s most popular English dance leaders, with invitations to many festivals and summer dance camps each year. He has taught at the Mendocino Folklore Camp, the Pinewoods English Dance Week, the Family Week at Timber Ridge, and the Stockton Folk Dance Camp, plus workshops in the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, and Australia. In the spring of 1993, Bruce was featured dance leader with the band Bare Necessities on a sell-out dance tour of England.

Part of Bruce's teaching focuses on non-choreographic elements of ECD: how to move well, how to be musical, how to recover from slips, how to be a good partner, body mechanics, and the social and mental aspects. He doesn’t teach many new or complex dances (claims he can’t remember them!) but instead focuses on skills that apply across all dances. He carries this focus into his sought-after callers’ classes, which he’s done for the last couple of decades. Training ECD teachers is relatively unexplored territory and it's very exciting. Learning to teach takes years, but even in a weekend or week-long mini-course he's been able to point students in useful directions, and some have made great strides.

He has served as the president of the Country Dance and Song Society, the umbrella organization for English dancing in North America. He helped start the Mountain View/San Jose English Dance series in the late 1970s, was a founding member of the Deer Creek Morris Men, and was a regular participant in Oakland's The Christmas Revels. While he has now retired from Scottish dancing, he was heavily involved in it for years, and has danced on demonstration teams, adjudicated festivals, and with his wife Jo has trained Scottish dance teachers.

In an e-mail received from Bruce he says, "I work from a collection of about 700 dances (with new ones arriving all the time) and teach whatever seems appropriate for the group in front of me. I'm interested in how the dancers move, how they give weight, how they match the music, how well they work with their partners, etc. In a workshop setting I also review the fundamentals of turns, heys, rights and lefts, and other figures. I pick dances that will help these people work on those skills. When the event is over, a few people will ask for the directions to a few of the dances but that’s not the point. Mostly people thank me for broadening their perspective, for showing how gate turns really work, for getting the group to use the space, etc. With folk dancers I'm missing the foundation that I build on when I teach a country or contra dance group, so we go much slower, of course. Stockton Camp's recommended pace of two dances per hour was about right, and I know that people want to take home dances to teach their classes, and I am happy to provide names, directions, teaching tips, and anything else."

full bio adapted from SoCal Folk Dance

"A retired research scientist, Bruce is always looking for new ways to understand and present ideas for the dancer. Whenever he presents workshops, he weaves many conceptual threads besides dance technique and choreography into his lessons. Musicality, sociability, and physiology are his current favorites. People often say they come away with a different way to experience and think about dance."

from Chicagoland English Country

Bruce calling "Red and All Red" at the Lenox Assembly weekend camp in Lenox, MA

Bruce calling Jack's Health in Durham, NC

Bruce calling "La Russe" at Fandango! weekend in Atlanta, GA