It’s a hot, sunny summer solstice in Lewiston, and anticipation hangs in the air at the Montello Heights retirement community. A band of fiddlers, ranging in age from 14 to 81, warm up their strings in one corner of the activity room. Residents tap their feet and call out to one another in the crowd. Young children huddle together in back, and a group of friends from nearby Bates College chat about what they’ve been doing over summer break.

Cindy LaRock, dressed in a T-shirt, flowing skirt and soft-soled shoes, beckons dancers young and old to a clearing on the floor.

“This better be easy,” says a woman balancing a toddler on her hip.

“This is called a tres simple circle dance,” LaRock answers. Then she looks out at the crowd. “What does that mean?”

“Very simple,” replies Helen Sylvain of Lewiston.

So simple it almost went by the wayside in her hometown, a city with a rich Franco-American heritage. In the first half of the 20th century, “kitchen parties” with fiddle bands and step dancing were a weekend tradition. By the time LaRock was a teenager, they were all but extinct.

Those days, being French wasn’t considered something to celebrate. If it weren’t for LaRock’s love of contradancing, she never would have discovered this lively part of her heritage. And if she hadn’t met Benoit Borque, a master Quebecois step dancer, the multigenerational dance at Montello Heights might have never happened.

“We were going to Lewiston in 1990 to do a concert and a dance,” said Borque, whose band, Le Vent du Nord, will perform at The American Folk Festival on the Bangor Waterfront. “Since that time we got in touch and I came many times to teach her step dancing and also many French Canadian social dances.”

The Maine Arts Commission awarded the dancing duo consecutive traditional-arts apprenticeships, which defrayed some of Bourque’s travel costs from his home outside Montreal to Lewiston. It also allowed them to teach area youth through private classes, school visits and workshops.

The young dancers refer to Borque as their “guru,” and Larock feels the same way.

“His whole spirit involving traditional dance and music was so inclusive,” Larock said. “He did it for the love of it. He wasn’t expecting us to look perfect. He just has this infectious way of approaching the whole thing.”

They plan to share their passion for traditional French Canadian dance – and a few moves – with audiences of all ages at the American Folk Festival.

“Cindy builds bridges between different generations,” Bourque said. “It’s like a family approach, which is very, very important. It’s the root of it, in fact. It comes from family.”

At the summer solstice party, several of LaRock’s young proteges linked arms with elderly residents, skipped down the center of the dance floor with their parents, and giggled heartily when the music wound down.

“It’s fun, because you are doing it with a bunch of people, and it doesn’t matter if you do it wrong,” said one of LaRock’s students, 11-year-old Kiah Baxter. “It’s just fun.”

And not just for the under-20 set. Aliette Couturier, who alternated between dancing and playing spoons with the band, never had kitchen parties at home, but her aunts and uncles in Thetford Mines, Quebec, did.

“It would be so exciting,” she recalled.

Priscilla Allen, a resident at Montello Heights, stayed late at the party to hear the fiddle tunes, which brought back memories of weekends at Le Montagnard, a social club.

“My husband and I never missed a dance,” said Allen, a Madawaska native who moved to Lewiston to work in the textile mills. “We used to dance to this music.”

The music is a French-Canadian twist on traditional Irish and Scottish fiddle tunes.

“In France you don’t hear fiddle tunes like this,” Larock said. You don’t see dances like this, either. “Nobody really cares, though, because the idea is to have a good time.”

As the party drew to a close, a group of women, some of whom were in their mid-80s, took to the dance floor. They skipped and smiled, twirled and laughed, and when they were finished, they sat down and clapped out a rhythm with the fiddlers.

Now that’s joie de vivre.