Balfolk dancing is popular social dancing from Western Europe, a recent revival of traditional, mostly French, folk dances.
 Bourrées, jigues, gavotte, mazurkas, waltzes, scottishes: some partner dances, some group dances, some snakey chain dances.
They are all fun and easy to learn, you don’t need any partners or prior experience. We’ll show you how!
 
We always dance to live music: fiddles, accordions, clarinets and more…

Balfolk is a term used in the last 50 years to describe popular social folk dancing in Western Europe. It includes old traditional dances from a variety of French and western European regions, as well as modern tunes influenced by many styles composed for people to dance to. Balfolk is not definable as ONE style, but rather an umbrella term for many ways of dancing and playing for a huge repertoire of dances.

Balfolk Toronto was started by Tangi Ropars and Emilyn Stam in the spring of 2013, with our first big bal in March of 2014 and weekly dances on Mondays almost every Monday since 2013. Since then many people have contributed to the development of our community!

7pm: Tune Learning Session AKA Slow Jam with Cassie Norton
8pm: Dance! With music by Elise Boeur & Adam Iredale-Gray
The Tune Learning Session AKA Slow Jam is a pay what you can weekly workshop open to all people who are interested in playing balfolk music, but are either completely new to it, or find our dance jams a little too fast to pick up the tunes. We will learn a couple of tunes per week (maximum 2) and review tunes from previous weeks at each session. We will learn all tunes by ear, very slowly, first singing and then playing. ALL instruments are welcome, including the voice! Hope to see you at the session soon.

Fiddler Elise Boeur draws from the wells of Norwegian and Swedish fiddle music, melds in fistfuls of arcane influences, and emerges with a multi-faceted sound grounded in Nordic traditions. Adam Iredale-Gray is a versatile guitarist with deep roots in Irish traditional music and a commitment to innovation. They each spent years touring as collaborators with diverse projects, and as members of their prog-trad quintet Aerialists, and all along they were playing fiddle tunes at sessions, folk dances, and afterparties. With this duo project, you’re invited into these social music afterhours; a celebration of the experience of sharing fiddle traditions the way they’ve been shared for centuries, the tune recreating itself anew with each repetition as folks sit knee to knee and play.