Contra Dance Love
This time last year, I was writing about contra dance and all the things I love about it, inspired by a weekend of dancing that I’d just gotten back from. Well, that’s an annual weekend, so the more things change… Since I wrote that post, I set in motion a big change to make my home dance community more LGBTQIA+ friendly, and turned into a community leader (!!!) in the process. The change was painful in some ways, but it’s completed now and the community is thriving, with lots of new energy from some younger, newer dancers who would not have felt so welcome before. Right now, I’m a committee member-at-large, because shepherding that process AND doing our twice-monthly newsletter was too much. So instead I’ve been rewriting parts of our website, networking with organizers of dances in other cities, going to the occasional committee meeting, and posting dance-related memes from our Facebook page. Every once in a while it hits me that this isn’t just an activity I do, this is my community. At the dance two weeks ago, a friend and I were floor managing–doing setup and tear-down, and monitoring things during the event–and a couple of minor crises popped up. (They were both related to the fact that for a while during the event, nobody in attendance had a key to the venue.) We nabbed the other committee members who were there and solved the crises, then worked together to set up new systems so they wouldn’t…