Doina is a performance group based in London that over the years has assembled dances, music and folk costumes from many Eastern European countries.
We include dances from Central and South-East European countries, mainly Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Poland.
We dance to recorded music and perform at a variety of events including local festivals and carnivals, at church events, at hospital fetes, at fund-raising events for charity, at senior citizen meetings and in residential homes, at multicultural events, at Open Days, at leisure centres, for voluntary organisations and for schools.
Although we basically train to perform dances, the repertoire is still accessible. It changes over time as we learn new material, but we try to keep roughly the same number of items, including both relatively easier and more challenging dances.
We have often been joined by people with some dance experience, not necessarily a folk dance background, but some of our members actually started with no dance experience at all, some returned to dance after a break of many years: so all are welcome to come and try our dances.
The group was founded over 25 years ago by Alan McLean, who was very active in folk dancing between the 1960s and 1980s and who also started the Hungarian and Romanian groups (Balaton and Mărţişorul).