About

Coral Reid is a musician and traditional dance workshop leader from the UK, now based in Melbourne, Australia. A fiddle player in the English tradition, specialist in the north-east (UK) rapper sword dance, step clog dancer and oboe player. Coral loves to teach more than anything else, sharing her knowledge on English folk to anyone who will listen!

Coral is a graduate of Newcastle (UK) University’s Folk and Traditional Music degree, and continued her research documenting rapper dances with a grant from the English Folk Dance and Song Society in a project named The Rapper Census 2018. She also holds a diploma in classical oboe performance from Trinity College London.

Coral is an experienced workshop leader in both Australia and the UK, having toured Australia in late 2018-early 2019, leading workshops in Canberra, Melbourne and Brisbane, at the Illawarra folk festival, performed with the Australian Morris at Woodford Folk Festival, and lead dance workshops at the National Folk Festival 2022. In the UK, Coral has taught dance and performed around the country with The Newcastle Kingsmen and Star and Shadow Rapper, and led a series of rapper workshops for Music @ the Heart of Teesdale, a youth folk organisation. Coral received funding from Folk Alliance Australia to teach a series of rapper dance workshops in 2020.

In 2020, Coral began the English Traditions series, monthly online tunes workshops with participants across Australia. She also spent a few months teaching step clog dance online and created a Facebook group to share positive lockdown creations, named Clean Hands Create, which gained almost 2000 members worldwide. Lockdown time was otherwise spent on the technical and admin side of the Massive Singlet, zoom singing workshops with up to 500 participants, led by choirleader Stephen Taberner.

In the post-lockdown era, Coral has established herself as one of Melbourne’s few trad. music focussed fiddle teachers, teaching students of all ages, backgrounds and experience levels. She is a regular workshop leader at festivals around the country, and is occasionally found performing, both solo and as part of the trio the ‘Sofa of Fools’.

Past Highlights

National Folk Festival 2022, 2023
Woodford Folk Festival 2022/23
CresFest 2023