DVD - $15
VHS - $5 |
Together in Time Featuring Rodney Miller and Airdance
is a prize winning twenty-seven
minute documentary film about New England Contra music and dance.
Together in Time tells the story of "the dance that refused
to end". Scott Alarik, music writer for the Boston Globe
and National Public Radio described the film in the following
way:
"Before jazz or rock,
bluegrass or blues, New Englanders combined English country dancing
with Celtic fiddle tunes and strutting French-Canadian rhythms
to form, over generations, a uniquely American dance music called
Contra. This is its story, a tender-hearted epic brimming with
music as prim as an ice cream social and wild as a Vermont winter;
about a dance that refused to end, and the colorful, impassioned
folks who kept it alive through Puritan censorship, Civil War,
industrial revolution, and an ever changing America. The story
is told through the lives of the people themselves: 19th century
African-American fiddler John Putnam, seminal 20th century dance
caller Ralph Page, ageless mentor Bob McQuillen, and modern pied
pipers of contra, Dudley Laufman and Rodney Miller; adorable
101 year old dancer Florence Giffin and 13 year old musician
Conor Sleith: stiff collared industrial tycoon Henry Ford, who
tried to popularize the dance in the 1920's, and legions of long
haired hippies, who found haven from industrialized society in
the pastoral clip clop of Contra, but beyond that, "Together
in Time" is a provocative social history of how Americans
have fun, how they use that fun to build community - and to preserve
it."
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GREAT MEADOW MUSIC
