Mady has been teaching traditional dance of various sorts (international, Scottish, English) for 5 decades. From early ballet training on, she has been conscious of various aspects of movement to music, as well as the importance of the social side of traditional dance, and enjoys sharing the beauty and pleasure these elements can bring to dancing.
In 1988, she founded Fermilab International Folk Dancing, at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the far western suburbs of Chicago, and led that group and its associated performing group up until the pandemic stopped in person social dance. She helped to organize and occasionally taught the Silk and Thistle class of the RSCDS Chicago Branch as well as arranging other Scottish dance events and demos.
She has called and taught English Country dancing in the Chicago suburbs for the past 15 years. Fortunate to have taken classes on calling with Bruce Hamilton, Scott Higgs, and Joseph Pimentel, she has been a guest caller for English dances in St. Louis, MO, Ann Arbor, MI, Cocoa Beach, FL, and Berkeley, CA, and was pleased to be invited to teach dance workshops for the Jane Austen Society of North America when they held their previous yearly conference in Chicago.
For the past nearly 20 years she has directed the annual upper Midwest international folk dance workshop weekend known as June Camp. She is also on the committee that runs the Midwest Scottish Weekend; is a member of the Steering Committee running the Pourparler, a yearly conference for community dance leaders and teachers; and, as part of Chicagoland English Country Dancers, helps to organize the Harvest Moon Dance Weekend, an English dance weekend in the Chicago area.
New to online English calling, but not online dance teaching, Mady is excited to share her love for English dance with a wider audience, and is honored to help with Symmetry’s online program.
