Surrey International Folk Dancers meet every Thursday Evening, 7 to 9 p.m. at the Walnut Road Elementary School, a school in the Fleetwood area. New dancers are always welcome and there is teaching every week. We dance a wide variety of dances from all over the world. It has been shown that dancing is good exercise for your mind and body.

Our activities for December, 2013 included our Christmas Party which was held on December 12th. Approximately 26 people attended, some wore international costumes and we danced to requests from the dancers. We also had light refreshments.

In the coming month we will be performing some Scottish dances as well as other international dances at the Windsong Co-Housing Complex on 96th Avenue in Langley on Saturday 18th January to celebrate the birth of Robbie Burns. This will include a potluck of Scottish food, piping in the haggis, addressing the haggis and then dancing taught by our group. There will also be entertainment provided by a local folk group, Stab the Cat, followed by singing.

On Thursday January 23rd we will be holding our Open House from 7-9 which is free and gives new people a chance to try out our folk dancing group. This event will be advertised in on-line local newspapers, Facebook, and in local community meeting places, such as libraries and recreation centres. In fact I have brought some flyers tonight in case anyone is interested in attending or posting these flyers in order to advertise our event which would be very welcome.

I also wish to introduce the first ever Lyrids, a folk dance festival to be held April 25th to 27th in Burnaby which will include our Surrey Group, as well as three other dance groups from the Lower Mainland. This will be a weekend event with teachers being brought into the area to teach dance workshops. At the first ever Lyrids festival the instructors will be teaching dances from Turkey and Serbia. On the final day of the festival a local group, Kafana Republik, will be providing the music for dancing. This event will be held at the Gizeh Hall in Burnaby and we are expecting dancers from the Lower Mainland as well as Bellingham, Victoria, Anacortes, Calgary, California and Florida. We expect about 100 people to attend. The Burnaby folk dancers are organizing this event with our assistance.
See lyridsfolkdancefestival.org for further details.