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 happen again. I’m not THE main person in charge (thank goodness!), but…I’m one of them, and that feels good. And also kind of astonishing, still. Like, who am I and how did that happen?

Dance weekends are the reward for all the hard work. I get to spend 48 hours road-tripping, hanging out with friends from far-flung places (I had dinner on Saturday with a friend from California and a friend from Montreal), and of course, dancing!

A couple of highlights from the weekend… But first, you’ll need to understand that contra involves a sequence of moves that involves you and a partner dancing around another person and their partner (called “neighbours”), then switching places with them to face a new pair of “neighbours” and do the same sequence over again. (Wikipedia has a more thorough explanation.)

• On Friday, my current dance partner and I rescued a whole bunch of other dancers who had gotten lost in the sequence and were milling around in confusion. We finished with our current neighbours and sorted out the next pair. Then we did it again, and again, ultimately knitting the whole line of dancers back together. While having fun doing it.
• On Saturday, another partner and I were playing around, swapping partners with another couple. Suddenly, one of the foursome got sucked away into another dance line, to be replaced by someone else, and we didn’t see him for the rest of the dance. That’s never happened before!
• On Sunday, I lined up to dance with a friend and we enlisted a third person to join us to become a trio instead of the usual couple. Then we noticed that the next couple behind us were two people who are always up for doing goofy things like partner-swapping. Then they got joined by a third person. Suddenly there were six of us instead of four, all swapping positions and partners at random and giggling like mad while trying not to mess up our neighbours. It was glorious.

And that’s what I did on the weekend instead of working on my NaNoWriMo project. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a novel to write…