North Atlantic Fiddle Convention
Workshop Schedule
Workshops will be 2 hours in duration (perhaps with a small break) and are not intended for beginners but people who play fiddle or dance. There will be a maximum of 8 students in each workshop and they will be conducted through Zoom meetings.. The cost of each workshop will be €10.
Wednesday (3:15 - 5:15pm)

Claire Egan – Phrasing and Variation in Irish Traditional Fiddle
Niopha Keegan – The interpretation of the tune of James Hill – a contemporary approach
Link to registration and payment for Wednesday workshops is here.
Thursday ( 3:15 - 5:15pm)

Laura Risk
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Fiddling from Quebec and the Gaspé (Intermediate - Advanced)
Come learn some of the exciting fiddling repertoire from Québec and the Gaspé peninsula! Laura will share some tunes and stories about fiddle music in Québec, with a special focus on music from Douglastown, a village at the tip of Québec’s Gaspé peninsula, where she worked with the community to document local tunes. We’ll learn one or two tunes, along with bowing possibilities and a few options for ornaments and variations.
Sven Ahlbäck – Swedish Fiddle
Anne Lederman
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Indigenous Fiddling in Manitoba, Canada (Intermediate - Advanced)
The Indigenous Fiddling tradition in North-western Canada is a unique blend of French-Canadian, Scottish, American and Indigenous musics, forged throughout the fur trade in the 18th and 19th centuries. It involves sit-down footwork, irregular phrasing, sometimes altered tunings and unique repertoire. Anne will demonstrate the tradition as it happens in western Manitoba, and teach a couple of tunes.
Ranog Townsend (dance) – Introduction to Sean Nós Dancing
Link to registration and payment for Thursday workshops is here.
Friday (3.15-5.15pm)

Brid Harper – Tunes and Chat with Bríd Harper
Sophie Lavoie – Québec Session Tunes and Style
Karen Tansey (dance)
Link to registration and payment for Friday workshops is here.
Saturday (2:00pm - 4:00pm)

Christina Smith
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Dance Music of Newfoundland and Labrador (Intermediate – Advanced)
Christina will take you on a quick trip around the rocky and remote coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, where settlement patterns in the isolated bays and islands produced repertoires of unique, infectious, and quirky tunes for the square dance (the “set”), cotillion, and longways dances. She’ll introduce you to some skilled fiddlers who have never touched a bow. Along the way we’ll pick up some Newfoundland singles, and perhaps a double or a triple tune too if time allows!
Siobhan Peoples – Triplets in Irish tunes
Iain Mac Farlane – West Coast Highland Fiddle
Erynn Marshall
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Mountain Fiddle Tunings (Intermediate - Advanced)
If you’ve ever been interested to know more about alternate tunings on the fiddle and love the sound of drones – this is the class for you! First Erynn will demonstrate a bunch of tunings and some great old-time tunes from the southern states in different tunings. You can listen and/or record. Then she’ll teach a tune or two as time permits. Tunings covered will include DDAD, AEAE, AEAC# and more. Rosin up your bow and get ready for the drone zone!.
Sarah Fennell (dance)
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Tuning In
This workshop will bring dancers through an approach to movement that involves traditional Irish step dance vocabulary as a foundation and an introduction to embodiment as a way of generating creative flow and a full body approach to dance. Through journaling and attentive connection to music the class will allow students to begin to develop new relationships with Irish music, dance, the body and creativity.
Link to registration and payment for Saturday workshops is here.
