(was watching Outlander, triggered a memory…)
In any sort of dancing environment I expect I would be described as dancing informally.
In Scotland, the traditional square dance / barn dance is called a ceilidh. 99% of the time it is held in large lit community halls and is pretty tame, but heavy drinking is not frowned upon and it is good exercise, you’ll be grinning despite yourself.
I was fortunate on one of my visits to the Isle of Skye to end up at a less superficial ceilidh. At a pub on Saturday night suddenly it emptied an hour before closing. Being a very religious part of the world, they wanted to get home before midnight, before travelling on a Sunday was forbidden. I got dragged along and what happened in those early Sunday hours was quite disconnected from Christianity. In Aussie lingo, it was bogans drinking rum and cokes until dawn, where the lighting was low and passion was high. A genuine ceilidh (by my thinking) is like a pub lock-in, or a bachelor party, or one of those rare New Years Eves that lives up to expectations. The dancing was loud, brash and raunchy.
This was no mere “shall we head back to my place”. Although at someone’s farm, and very non-catered, it was a planned event. The partying abruptly stopped for half an hour while some chaste teenagers from a stricter island further out (yep, Wicker Man) sang a capella. Haunting and beautiful, not unlike Bulgarian throat singers.
The partying resumed but, they were staunchly religious, and the acquainting was measured on the dirty dancing scale, not the “now we have to get married” scale.
I absolutely love Scotland, but the people are a mixed bag for me. But in Skye, I felt I fitted in the most, quite like rural NZ in many ways. Rough, basic, and principalled.
If my memory was correct, the whisky was homemade, and my misunderstandings of how things worked was taken well.