Academic literature on the topic 'Cape Breton step dancing'

Square dancing forms a vibrant part of the traditional music scene in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. In addition to the weekly West Mabou square dance, monthly dances and occasional square dances can be found across the island year-round. The number of square dances balloons during the summer months. But quite unlike most other square dance traditions in North America, Cape Breton square dancing rarely features a caller, a person who calls out the movements so that dancers do not have to remember them and can focus instead on performing them, listening to the music, and socializing with other dancers. While callers are generally absent from Cape Breton's square dances today, they were once essential.

Detailed mapping in southeastern Cape Breton Island has revealed a strike-slip origin for the small Carboniferous outlier at Big Pond. Topographically low Carboniferous sedimentary rocks occur between splays of a previously unrecognized, northeast-trending set of high-angle faults, the Big Pond fault system. The section is dominated by fanglomerates, which coarsen toward the faulted basin margins and which were deposited and (or) reworked by currents flowing toward the basin's center and along its axis. We interpret the fanglomerates as syntectonic. Interbedded limestones of Visean age (Windsor B Subzone) provide age control for the upper part of the 300 m section and, by inference, for at least some of the fault motion. Dextral motion on the Big Pond fault system is indicated by (1) slickenside stepping directions on minor faults, which juxtapose basement against basement and which parallel the main northeast-striking fault; (2) northeast-striking mesoscale faults within the basin, which produce dextral offsets; and (3) shear and extension fractures in fanglomerate clasts along the northeast-striking basin margin faults, which reveal dextral and down-to-basin motion. The location of the basin at a right step in the through-going dextral fault system implies that it is a pull-apart basin. We suggest that during Visean times, southern Cape Breton Island was cut by several such dextral wrench faults and associated sedimentary basins and that the tectonic climate was similar to that recognized by previous workers in Newfoundland and New Brunswick. No evidence was found in support of the paleomagnetically based hypothesis for sinistral strike slip during this time.

2017, in conjunction with celebrations of 150 years of Canadian Confederation and with funding from government programs, young people from across Cape Breton Island were invited to participate in a performance creation project to explore narratives and experiences of migration and encounter. Youth (ranging in age from seven to nineteen) from disparate places, including Membertou First Nation (a reserve), Chéticamp (an Acadian, francophone town), Étoile de l’Acadie (a francophone school and community centre in Sydney), and Whitney Pier (a district of Sydney that is home to diverse immigrant cultures, primarily from Barbados, Italy, Newfoundland, Poland, Croatia and Ukraine) all met in their own communities. They listened to elders discuss their own experiences of migration and encounter, and responded by creating new performance pieces grounded in song, dance, film (including new technologies such as virtual reality and 360-degree cameras), spoken word and story. They came together on 22 October 2017 to share their creative work with one another and with public audiences. We examine issues that arose during the creative process and of young participants’ post-process reflections, according to each of the ways in which Vertovec (“Conceiving”) has identified transnationalism. Interpretations of the Cape Breton youths’ own senses of rooted place are positioned in relation to transnational experiences present within their communities. These young people’s expressions of the local (for example, Acadian step dance and Mi’kmaq traditional drumming) morph into expressions of the transnational (for example, hip hop and pop music production); musical expressions use so-called traditional instruments (bagpipes or hand drums), DJ mixing techniques, djembe, Acadian folk music, and Elvis. Problematizing assumptions about what it is to be a Cape Bretoner, and interrogating how migration and resulting encounters have shaped how these young people choose to express themselves, this paper examines how they simultaneously express and contest transnationalism.

Abstract The dynamic environmental conditions in highly seasonal systems likely have a strong influence on how species use the landscape. Animals must balance seasonal and daily changes to landscape risk with the underlying resources provided by that landscape. One way to balance the seasonal and daily changes in the costs and benefits of a landscape is through behaviorally-explicit resource selection and temporal partitioning. Here, we test whether resource selection of coyotes (Canis latrans) in Cape Breton Highlands National Park, Nova Scotia, Canada is behaviorally-explicit and responsive to the daily and seasonal variation to presumed costs and benefits of moving on the landscape. We used GPS data and local convex hulls to estimate space use and Hidden Markov Models to estimate three types of movement behavior: encamped, foraging, and traveling. We then used integrated step-selection analysis to investigate behaviorally explicit resource selection across times of day (diurnal, crepuscular, and nocturnal) and season (snow-free and snow). We found that throughout the day and seasonally coyotes shifted foraging behavior and altered behavior and resource choices to avoid moving across what we could be a challenging landscape. These changes in behavior suggest that coyotes have a complex response to land cover, terrain, and linear corridors that are not only scale dependent but also vary by behavior, diel period, and season. By examining the resource selection across three axes (behavior, time of day, and season), we have a more nuanced understanding of how a predator balances the cost and benefits of a stochastic environment.

The evolution of the Bras d’Or Lakes since the retreat of the last ice sheets c. 15 ka (thousands of radiocarbon years before present, where present is defined as 1950) is inferred from multibeam bathymetry, seismic reflection profiles, and sediment cores. The thickness of stratified sediment in the Lakes overlying glacial till shows that there was a step-like retreat of ice towards a late ice centre in the western part of the Bras d’Or Lakes. As ice retreated, a lake formed in the area of the modern Bras d’Or Lakes and probably drained through Little Bras d’Or Channel. Ice retreat and sea level change on the continental shelf off south-eastern Cape Breton are inferred from multibeam bathymetry that shows proglacial subaerial river channels and suggests that sea level was perhaps 50 m lower than present about 15 ka. Relative sea level appears to have risen subsequently, so that marine conditions existed in Bras d’Or Lakes basin at 10 to 9 ka. Sea level may have risen to -15 m (below modern sea level)before falling again in the early Holocene. This falling early Holocene relative sea level resulted in the creation of freshwater lakes, with a prominent erosion surface at -25 m marking the lake level in some areas. Rising sea level then resulted in a return to marine conditions in the Lakes by 4 to 5 ka. L’évolution des lacs Bras d’Or depuis le retrait des dernières nappes glaciaires il y a 15 000 ans se révèle par la bathymétrie multifaisceaux, les profils de réflexion sismique et les carottes de sédiments. L’épaisseur des sédiments stratifiés dans le till sus-jacent des lacs démontre qu’il y a eu un retrait en escaliers des glaces vers un centre fini-glaciaire situé dans la partie occidentale des lacs Bras d’Or. Les eaux, libérées lors du retrait des glaces, s’échappèrent probablement via le canal du Little Bras d’Or pour former un lac dans le lit actuel des lacs Bras d’Or. Le retrait des glaces et les changements du niveau de la mer sur la plateforme continentale au sud-est de Cap-Breton sont mis en évidence par la bathymétrie multifaisceaux, qui montre des lits de rivière sub-aériens proglaciaires et indiqueque le niveau de la mer se trouvait peut-être à 50 m plus bas qu’aujourd’hui il y a environ 15 milles d’années. La hausse du niveau de la mer depuis cette époque a provoqué l’inondation des lacs Bras d’Or ancestraux il y a de 9 à 10 milles d’années, et le niveau des eaux aurait atteint -15 m avant de chuter au début de l’Holocène. Cette chute relative du début de l’Holocène a résulté en la création de lacs pour une seconde fois, avec une importante surface d’érosion à -25 m qui marque le niveau des eaux dans certaines zones. Ces lacs ont été finalement inondés par la mer il y a de 4 à 5 milles d’années.

With the fear of decline of the Cape Breton fiddling tradition after the airing of The Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler by the CBC in 1971, both the Cape Breton community and ethnographers clamored to preserve and maintain the extant practices and discourse. While this allowed for performance contexts and practices to burgeon, it also solidified certain perspectives about the “diasporic preservation” and resultant “authenticity.” This work aims to trace the seeds and developments of the beliefs surrounding the Cape Breton fiddling tradition, from the idealizations of Enlightenment Scotland to the manipulation and commercialization of the folklore and Celticism of twentieth-century Nova Scotia. These contexts romanticized older practices as “authentic,” a construct that deeply impacted the narrative about the Cape Breton fiddling tradition. One of the most rooted and complex concepts in this narrative is that of “old style,” a term that came to represent the idealized performance practice in post-1971 Cape Breton fiddling. As models were sought for younger players to emulate, pre-1971 “master” fiddlers with innovative stylistic approaches began to be identified as “old style” players. The interstices of the tradition allowed more extreme stylistic experimentation to be accepted as “traditional,” while the symbiotic social practice of dancing necessitated relative conservatism. Analysis will show that “listening” tunes fell into the interstices of allowable innovation, while dance (particularly step-dance) tunes demanded certain “old style” techniques. A more holistic view of the complexities of the Cape Breton fiddling tradition follows from a perspective not only of the socio-musical elements that shaped the historical narrative, but also of the musical elements of this dance-oriented “old style.”