This ceili was organised in Gasthaus Jägersruh in Polsdorf, a very small community close to Allersberg, located on the north-east side of the Rothsee. This is about 750 km from my place, so you can guess I must have had a very good reason to make the trip. Well, the ceili was organised during the 2nd After-Summer School in Irish Dancing, and because I attended that event, it was not that much trouble to drive to Polsdorf.

I couldn't believe my eyes when I encountered in the dancing hall Nathan Baillieul and his girl friend Sandra Kuhnert. Nathan is a very talented bagpipe player and Irish dancer from Flanders who won several competitions. He lives now with Sandra, whom I met during the Proitzer Mühle Irish Summer Dancing School 2003 in Potsdam near Berlin. Both of them lived a few months in Dublin, taking an intensive training course at the famous O'Shea School of Irish Dance.

The band for the night was Irish Trad. Heads from Nürnberg, a group that is used to play for ceili dancers. They were accompanied by dancing master Bernd Menzel, one of the driving forces behind the Erlangen Irish Dancing scene.

When we entered the dancing hall, the band was already playing, but only a few dancers were present. So we started to improvise with some bits and pieces from dances such as The Fairy Reel, The Ballyvourney Jig Set and some sequences from the Plain Reel Set. After a while, when more people entered, the majority of them being attendees of the Summer School as well, hence familiar with traditional Irish dancing but not set dancing or folk dancing, Nathan and I took the opportunity to teach them the gigue. Also nobody seemed able to dance a mazurka, although it was extremely well played by the band. There was just me and Sabine on the floor dancing a mazurka, while Bernd prefered to go for a slow waltz choreography, despite the mazurka accents.

As soon as more dancers showed up, Bernd took the lead. Amongst the dances we already were familiar with, figured the Siege of Ennis, the Clare Lancers, the Mazurka Set, and the Circassian Circle.

Completely new for me was the ceili dance The Three Tunes in which a jig, a hornpipe and a reel are mixed together. Here is the official choreography as defined by An Coimisiún le Rincí Gaelacha. I did not like it too much, specifically not the roly-poly piece. Music for the dance features on a few CDs: Treble Maker by Jim Butke, and Mike Shaffer's A collection of Irish Dance Music.

Then Anne-Marie Cunningham and Tereza Bernardova, the teachers of ASS 2005 took it over, though with nothing new to us: the Walls of Limerick and Every Man's chance. Well, the unofficial version of the Siege of Ennis was kind of new: it has the same line up as the official one, but is danced to reels instead of jigs. The rising step is replaced by simple 1-2-3's, and the centre wheel and outer swing figure by a swing opposite for everybody.

The ceili ended with a competition between musicians and dancers, although I'm not sure that it was intended to be the end. Tereza came up with the idea, convinced as she was that the dancers would give up after 10-20 minutes. But that was an awful mistake: Nathan and me managed to dance for 45 minutes, and if the musicians would not have stopped, we would have continued.