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 the people doing those roles, and they cause some people active discomfort or dysphoria, so there’s a movement to change to a different pair of terms. The current leading gender-free terms are “larks” and “ravens”.) Can I just say, I missed geeking out about stuff with people.
I learned a couple of new dance flourishes (tricks) and promptly forgot them again. (Side note: This is how the folk process works. One person shows another person a new flourish, and it spreads. So cool.) I practiced waltzing as a lead. I screwed up sometimes (but then most of us do) and successfully navigated difficult bits at other times. I got to enjoy being good at something. It’s sort of like…if you enjoy crosswords, you do the regular ones all week and then the big ones on Sundays are a treat because they’re more challenging? Dance weekends are like that.
What I love about contra is that you all have to work together to make the dance work – coordinating your location/direction of movement, playing off each other’s momentum, figuring out how the tricky parts work and how to recover when there’s (inevitably) a goof-up.
All of that working together is more gratifying during a dance weekend, because the dances are so much more challenging that mastering them is more absorbing and gives a bigger sense of accomplishment (and people are better at the skills required – momentum is a big one that makes even simple dances much more satisfying).
For example, some dances have what we call “end effects”. Normally you get to the end of a line and “wait out” for one time through the dance, then trade places with your partner and come back in heading the other direction. For more complicated dances, that’s not necessarily true – so the challenge is in figuring out where you have to stand and what you have to do in the pattern. Maybe one of you has to do something while the other one is still waiting. Maybe you both have to stand on the same side. Maybe you both have to do something before you trade places. Etc. If you’re quick, you can get to where you’re needed at the last minute, but it’s more satisfying if you figure it out yourself ahead of time.
Plus there’s community and wonderful live music and using your body and hanging out with so many friends and getting into a state of flow for 48 hours…
I can’t wait for the next one.
*sighs happily and goes to fall over*