The Paris News

Just as jazz is a form of music developed in the United States, taking bits and pieces of many forms of expression and melding it into its own recognizable form, clog dancing, too, is an amalgam of many dance genres.

Cloggers weave steps taken from diverse countries such as Scotland, England, and Dutch-Germans, Even Cherokee Indians, African blacks and Russian gypsies contributed styles and steps.

The Paris Cloggers bring this uniquely American art form to life every Monday and Wednesday nights at the YWCA of Paris and Lamar County.

It’s a good thing for us to be a part of the Y. It gives them a program people are interested in,” said Susan Davis, clogging instructor.

A new beginner class starts at 5:30 p.m. Monday, Sept. 14, in the YWCA building at 308 S. Main St.

“It’s an awesome stress reliever. You can’t think about work. You can’t think about family. You don’t think about anything other than what’s the next step. And how do I do it. At the end, you may be tired, but it’s a good type of tired,” Davis said.

Davis is offering the September classes for beginners at no charge. She suggests dancers wear tennis shoes and try a few classes before they invest in taps and special shoes.

“If they want to come up and try it out before they make a commitment, that’s the way to do it. Once you get these type shoes, you’re looking at about a $60 to $70 investment,” she said.

A pair of clogging taps goes for around $15, and if a student wishes, they can purchase some flat-bottom shoes on which Davis says she can glue the taps.

“We just start out with holding onto the bar and doing a double toe. I have to get them to understand their foot works different from their leg,” Davis said. “So many people are so stiff, you have to realize you can tap your toes and make two sounds, then we’ll do double step, then we build. It usually takes about six weeks to go through every basic step. Then we start putting it together in songs. We start out slowly then add on. I don’t think any of my starters now started out as a youngster taking dance. I don’t think anyone else ever did.”

The class is open to anyone interested, and Davis said she would love to get men involved. More than half of those who attend clogging seminars around the state are men, so it isn’t just a women’s dance.

In the meantime, Davis and 14 other Paris cloggers are attending the third annual Best of Texas Clogging Jamboree at Six Flags this weekend.

The group has been practicing for this event since January, working up 10 to 12 songs, then paring them down to meet time limitations set for the show.

“We have 20 minutes to get on stage, dance and get off,” Davis said. The group has put together five songs and are practicing up to three hours each session in order to be ready for the marathon clogging.

“Their goal is to have continuous clogging from the time the park opens until the time the park closes. So, it’s supposed to be like clockwork. So many minutes before you are to perform you should be there and as soon as this group finishes, you get up do yours, get off, and the next one comes on,” Davis said.

The Paris Cloggers are on the Six Flags stage for three 20-minute sessions.

“I’m sure well have some funny stories coming out of it,” she said.

The Paris Cloggers perform all over Paris and the surrounding area, and they do it at no charge.

“Sometimes people give us a token thank you very much and that’s awesome,” Davis said. “We’re trying to get enough money at some point to hopefully buy us a floor, one of those dance floors are three by three squares of wood you hook together. When you go away from the Y, that has a great wood floor, it’s very difficult to dance on the street. It eats your taps. That’s hard. Anything with gravel you can hardly dance on it. People don’t understand. They’ll ask us to dance on the stage at the civic center, but the stage there is carpeted. You can’t dance on carpet. There’s no sound!”

Annual events such as the YWCA Art Fair and Tinsel and Tidings feature the Paris Cloggers, and they perform at Roxton’s Hawg Waller and at nursing homes or for the Kiwanis or the Red Hat Ladies.

“We’re all hams, we’ll put on our shoes and we’ll go. We had a Christmas show we worked up, Christmas parties for churches and things like that,” Davis said. They also plan to dance at the fair later this month.

“Becky Semple (Paris Visitors and Convention Council tourism director) has used us several times through the chamber when she has groups come in. She had a group last year, and I wrote a show on Paris, Texas,” Davis said.

The show was about a lonesome Paris cowboy who fell in love with the Bugtussle ballerina. The show featured such music as “Cowboy Sweetheart” and Dolly Parton’s “Marry Me,” with slides of historic places showing in the background.

“The funniest thing was the end of it. Our cowboy grew old and he and his Bugtussle ballerina were in the nursing home and we came out dressed as old women with wigs and walkers, and we did a dance to ‘If My Friends Could See Me Now,’ using the walkers. It’s hilarious because we’d stuff everything and come out and do the walker thing. Whatever group that it was that came to tour Paris thought it was great.”

There’s nothing better than watching a live show, but to get an idea of what clog dancing is like, Davis suggests looking up the Fab Five, a group of five sisters who are on “America’s Got Talent.”

“The thing about what they are doing, and I’m not taking anything away from what they are doing because you can tell they have practiced forever. They’re doing the same steps we do. It’s just that when you start out you do them slowly and as you get better you do them faster and faster. It’s the faster that is impressive,” Davis said.

Davis teaches all the basic steps — double toe, double step, double step with a rock step — then adds other variations as students gain expertise and confidence.

“As you get to where you’re doing it more, you can do steps adding extras. And then it’s faster. That’s the thing. You really don’t have to learn a lot of different steps, you just get more and more confident and you can do it faster and faster.”

The hit of the show

The group of cloggers who dance in Paris began when a group of five mothers and their daughters learned the dance and performed at a recital put on by Lisa Dean, a resident of Idabelle, Okla., who ran the Broadway Academy of Dance.

The daughters were taking lessons from Dean and some of the mothers would sit in on the classes, which ranged from tap and ballet to jazz. Davis described Dean as a very energetic individual who was always putting on shows and recitals.

“She would do solos in the show with clogging,” Davis said. “You can tell I’m not very athletic. I’m not this skinny little person and my friend isn’t either, and we’d sit there and watch her and we decided in our minds that the reason she was skinny was because she clogged. Now, it wasn’t the fact she danced seven hours a day, you know. It was clogging. That was our answer.”

They convinced Dean to start a clogging class and they began lessons in January 1994.

“We had a class where she started out with the basic steps and after we were learning some dances, we were so tired at the end of that, we would be laying on the floor. I remember one day I raised my head and said, ‘If I’m going to work this hard, I want to be in a recital.’ All the moms were like, ‘Shut up, Susan. What are you saying?’”

They learned the steps to the then-popular Michael Jackson song “Smooth Criminal,” and became good enough the instructor let them into the show.

“We did it with fedoras. We had black tights, black leotard and a black suit coat that was made out of shiny satin-looking stuff and machine guns. I hate to say this, but we were the hit of the show. We were the last dance and it was the moms and the daughters. The audience loved it,” Davis said.

The 10 women were such a hit, in fact, the recital the following year featured 40 cloggers.

A few years later, Dean was no longer able to travel to Paris, so after a hiatus of a few months, the original crew got back together to practice the steps they already knew.

In 1998, they attended their first conference, the Texas Cloggers Rally, in Waco.

“We learned new steps, learned new dances. It was like opening a new world,” Davis said.

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