The Flurry Festival

The Flurry is an annual event that takes place in Saratoga, New York. It's held on Valentine's Day weekend--a perfect time for everyone to immerse themselves in live music and dance. Singles and couples are welcomed, and the overlapping sessions are set up to encourage everyone to join in the fun.

Even in winters less harsh than this one has been, we all need some bucking up for our sagging spirits. Outside, it's relentlessly gray and cold. All the eating and drinking holidays have been over for more than a month. February slumps in its middle, and spring is just an idea without substance.

 Enter the Flurry Festival, where the spirit of inclusion and celebration abounds. Participants range from toddlers to the elderly. Highly-skilled musicians of all stripes accompany the multiple sessions of dance. Those who aren't booked come to make music with their peers. Impromptu concerts spring up in corridors and corners.

Walking through the corridors of the Hilton and City Center, we hear chamber and classical music, country reels, folk, swing, bluegrass, and Zydeco. As a novice, I can't name all of the kinds of music I hear or identify all of the instruments. The sounds of reeds, strings, and percussion surround us wherever we go from Friday night to Sunday afternoon.

We have our choice of dance sessions. We go to hour-long lessons in contra, Cajun, hip hop, waltz, and country dancing from different nations and cultures. Some sessions are unstructured, offering the space and music for more experienced dancers to let loose.

When we are tired, we find a lesson to observe from the chairs on the perimeter of the room. Sometimes we decide to get up and give a new dance a try. Sometimes we watch, contently, until rested, we find another place to dance.

Or we walk through those music-filled corridors and plop down to listen to jam sessions. They expand before our eyes. What starts as a duet or trio draws more and more musicians. On Saturday morning, we pass a group of about ten violinists on our way to check out a session called Waltzes by Women. When we pass that way again later, the number of violinists has grown to forty plus.

It's a privilege to be at this unusual event. Whether listening or dancing with it, music is magic, lifting us from the midwinter doldrums.

Check out flurryfestival.org  to see what you missed and plan for next year.