Contact Us at Interfolk.Co.Uk

If you have any queries about international folk dancing in the UK, please contact us and we will try to help. Below we are making a list of questions we have helped out with so far though some were questions we never envisaged.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do we know someone who can ...?

Unless they are International Folk or English Country people, usually the answer is no. We have a reasonable knowledge of the teachers in the UK and if we cannot help we will probably know someone who can. Whilst we have put people in touch with bands, we often are only aware of them by repute (we do not provide reviews). I think the oddest query we got was from someone who wanted to hire a Jewish Marching Band for a Bar Mitzvah and strangely enough we actually knew someone.

We suggest you check out our resource links, which can be helpful for the styles we know nothing about. For modern (ballroom, salsa, etc), tap etc go to our links page and under resources select DanceWeb.

Can we help with schools programs?

We have provided information and advice to 4 primary school teachers so far and are glad to help (hopefully just in pointing you in the right direction). There seems to be a number of teachers embarking on teaching Folk dance under the National Curriculum without any resources or back up.

We have helped obtain a Serbian folk dance costume for a dance course in Worthing since our friend Ibo in Switzerland knows a costume maker in Serbia from which it could be ordered.

Not so Frequently Asked Questions

A television company got in touch with us to see if we could find them a Russian Dance Troupe and we put them in contact with Orlyk in Manchester,

A company asked us why we ranked higher than them for one of their keywords combinations we had inadvertantly put on this page. We are not really geared to give support/assisstance on these matters.

John Douglas (aka Janet's husband) is a firmware engineer Amoung his achievements was writing the software for the Irish Rail telephone System Exhange, the communications computers of the ground station for the UK satellites STRV A and B, and for a series of Safety Critical instrumentation for aircraft. He is currently working for a company who produces the Tinytag range of Data Loggers

John is also interested in English heritage especially past building in Bath from Roman to Georgian times and recommends Bath Past by Jean Manco as a good research site. It covers the history of Bath including Saxon, Medieval (covers Bath Abbey), Tudor & Stuart and, of course, Georgian periods.

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Spot continues to offer stress reduction sessions involving long walks in the countryside. Spot is the enternal optimist and cannot envisage life as any other than fun.

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Topsy has grown and is a danger to all the local wildlife (though rather wary of the foxes behind the house). She is a very good indicator of temperature, moving around the house and garden looking for the warmest spot (apart from Spot, that is, who resents being used as a pillow). She can detect the relative humidity and reacts with shock to any water.

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Janet Douglas started dancing Maypole and English country dances at school. She has always liked to dance; anything from Scottish to disco and Asturian to belly-dance. When she worked in Spain she used English country dance as a language teaching aid and on her return joined a circle dance group where she met the love of her life – John – the creator of this website.

Janet Douglas has attended courses and seminars on dances from the former Yugoslavia in Belgrade, Holland and England under teachers such as Paja Milic, Dragan Micic, Ibrahim Rizevski and Vladimir Janovski. Turkish folkdance is another area of interest; Ersin Seyhan has been the main influence. Janet Douglas is a recognised teacher of the Society for International Folk Dancing (SIFD), and has also attended many workshops.

Janet Douglas is involved with the following:

1) Gosport & Fareham Interfolk as the teacher.
2) Bognor Regis International Dance Ensemble as the organiser and teacher.
3) East Preston Dance Circle as one of two teachers.
4) Felpham & Middleton English Country Dance Club as Vice-Chairman and a caller.
5) Eastbourne International Folk Dance Festival - one of the organisers.
6) Newsletter of the Society for International Folk Dancing (SIFD) as the editor.