SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
A group of passionate senior folk dancers have heel-toe polka-ed their way into a new dance collective.

Velma Sterenberg, left, Louise Debogorski, Alicia Stawnichy and Ramona Normandin joke around after practicing a folk-dance routine they are working on in their new dance collective, Yellowknife Elders Folk Dance Collective. - Robin Grant/NNSL photo

Every Tuesday night since October, these seniors have been getting together at the Holy Trinity Anglican Church to practise folk dances as part of the newly founded Yellowknife Elders Folk Dance Collective. The collective is a recreational international folk dance group.

Members were practising moves inspired by a traditional Romanian dance called Alunelel Tuesday night.

"We learned the first steps, which is basically going around in a sequence, then we just choreographed the steps we made up," said founding member Velma Sterenberg. "That's part of the being a collective. If you think, 'Gee, we could do something different with this dance,' you do, and as long as everybody likes it, you keep going."

Last fall, the small but determined group formed the new collective when their plans to keep dancing with the Aurora Ukrainian Dancers fell through.

"There was no avenue for elders folk dance that we could find in Yellowknife, and so we just said, 'Hey, let's form our own group,'" Sterenberg said.

The founding members, which also include Alicia Stawnichy, Louise Debogorski, Ramona Normandin and Kyle Belton-Horton, established the group as a collective, which meant getting insurance and finding a regular place to practise at Holy Trinity Anglican Church.

Being an international folk dance group, they said they are open to learning all types of folk dances.

So far, in addition to the Romanian Alunelel, the members have also tried out a dance from Quebec called La Bastringue and different types of traditional Ukrainian and Scandinavian dances.

And they aren't stopping there.

"Truly the multiculturalism aspect is important to us," Sterenberg said, adding she recently proposed a Zimbabwean folk dance to the group.

"If we can do some Metis jigs or step dances or even a Dene tea dance, that'll be good, too."

Louise Debogorski said the founders were driven to establish the collective because of their love for all sorts of folk dancing. She said their age hasn't stopped them either.

"Someone asked us if we wanted to dance until we died. We actually thought about that for a while and said, 'Yeah we kind of do. We do want to keep dancing until we die.'"

There are health benefits of dancing too, added Sterenberg.

"A lot of people think that if you want to keep your brain active and fight the possibility of senility or dementia, you should be focusing on crossword puzzles and things like that. But long-term analysis shows that anything that involves music is good for the brain and just straight keeping your brain healthy and keeping your body healthy, too."

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