Contra Dance Geekery Strikes Again
It’s been a while since I’ve written about contra dance in this space. Rest assured, I haven’t stopped doing it! I just didn’t have anything new to say. But I have attained new heights of contra dance geekery. I just got back from a full weekend of dancing in another city — Friday evening, all day Saturday, all evening Saturday, and Sunday until late afternoon. (Why yes, my feet did hurt after that. But so did my smile muscles.) I carpooled in a minivan full of dancers, along with our dance shoes and twirly skirts and snacks and other, less important things. (Here’s a short YouTube clip from the weekend so you can see what I’m talking about. There’s a “caller” who has taught us the dance before the live music started and has continued to prompt us occasionally — you can hear her now and then. Contra is all about patterns of movement, rather than footwork.) We spent a good chunk of the drives geeking out — dissecting the various dances we’d done over the weekend, or talking about the finer points of technique (momentum. It’s all about momentum. Except when it’s about patterns), or plotting the best way to convince our local group to change some of the heteronormative terminology. (That last is a debate that’s sweeping the wider contra community across North America. Short version: We’ve traditionally called the two dance roles “lady” and “gent”, but those terms no longer map very well to the genders of…