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Barry Lanham and his Foot Stompin' Express Cloggers are taking the Appalachian folk dance far from its roots.

About 7,500 miles to be exact.

Next May, Lanham and four members of his Owensboro-based dance troupe will be heading for Shanghai, China, to perform during American Folk Dance and Music Week.

"This is almost too good to be true," Su-hwa "Winny" Lin, a Chinese-American teacher at Tamarack Elementary School, said recently.

Lin said Concordia International School in Shanghai has authorized $8,000 for Lanham and "four of his best cloggers to teach our Kentucky state dance to their K-12 students for a week from May 28 to June 1, 2007."

Lanham, who teaches clogging in the city and county school systems' community education program, said this will definitely be the Foot Stompin' Express' longest trip.

"We've been as far as North Carolina before," he said. "But we've never been outside the country."

Foot Stompin' Express, which once won the Tennessee State Clogging Championship, is made up of about 300 of Lanham's students. Different members perform at different events.

"This is very exciting," Lanham said. "It's wonderful to be able to take this dance internationally."

Historians say clogging, which earlier this year became the official state dance of Kentucky, is uniquely American.

They say it evolved from the foot-tapping folk dances of early Irish, Scottish, English and Dutch-German settlers in the eastern mountains.

The word "clog," they say, is Gaelic for "time." And clogging is a dance in time with the music, with the heel keeping rhythm.

The style, historians says, also owes a debt to Cherokee Indians, black Americans and Russian Gypsies.

"I have been working on taking Kentucky cloggers to dance in China since two years ago," Lin said. "Without the help of a friend, Elly Tjahjadi, it may not have happened."

Tjahjadi and her family lived in Evansville for several years. And she saw the Foot Stompin' Express performing at Owensboro's Multicultural Festival.

"She was fascinated by it," Lanham said.

Tjahjadi moved to Shanghai when General Electric promoted her husband to head its research department there.

The couple's sons attend Concordia International School, and Tjahjadi has become a major fundraiser for the school, Lin said.

"She highly recommended the group to her school and persuaded the school to invite the group to teach the Kentucky folk dance to all the students," Lin said.

"They will demonstrate the folk dance to all the students in a general assembly, conduct workshops during physical education for grades 1-12, teach students after school in special workshops and perform in the school's spring concert," she said.

Concordia is an 8-year-old school with more than 650 students from several countries.

Joining Lanham on the trip are Teresa Wills, a member of the Gingham Girls, a group that features traditional Appalachian dancing; Matthew Wills, a 17-year-old Owensboro Catholic High senior, who has been dancing since he was 9; Sarah Kuegel, an 18-year-old Apollo High senior, who has been performing since she was 6; and Paul Day, a 19-year-old University of Louisville freshman, who has been dancing for eight years.

Lanham, a member of the American Clogging Hall of Fame, began clogging 17 years ago as a way to relieve stress.

"I had always heard of clogging," he said. "I had seen it on TV, but I think it was the name that caught my attention. I saw an ad for a clogging class in the paper and it sounded like fun. It was fascinating to me -- the sight, the sound, the rhythm."

Clogging "really works as a stress reliever," Lanham said. "But I'm going to have to dance a lot the night before we leave. It's about an 18-hour trip. And that's a lot of stress."

China may open the doors to more international travel.

"A friend from England saw us at the Multicultural Festival too," Lanham said. "He was also very, very impressed. Maybe we'll get to go there too someday."