| Dorothea Flengeris's Rant and Rave was right on (Calgarians don’t dance, Feb. 17 - 23, 2005). When Bruce Springsteen last played the Saddledome he literally begged the audience to get up and dance; few did. And when David Byrne performed at the Calgary Folk Music Festival a few years back, the crowd sat on their blankets as if they were watching The Lawrence Welk Show.
I remember thinking how awful it must have been for Byrne and his band to be maniacally gyrating onstage and getting no discernible reciprocation from the audience. Finally – ironically, I believe it was during "Life During Wartime" – a group of maybe 20 people near the front, including the superb dancer Denise Clark, got up to dance. At which point I was hit in the head with a glass beer bottle thrown by someone who objected.
Something of a melee ensued; when I asked a security guard to call a cop (as we could identify the creep who'd thrown the bottle at me), he refused, blamed us for dancing and said we should sit down or we'd be asked to leave. Byrne's encore? A salsa version of Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody."
I have never attended another folk festival.
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