Category:

Public "Advanced" Dances....Yea or Nay?

6/12/2013

(Perhaps this should be subtitled, "In Which The Blogger Kicks A Hornet Nest.")

There are various threads around the web lately about outreach to new dancers (and ways to revamp how we approach beginners), or the importance of feeding your local dance community as well as the snazzy dance weekends that tend to self-select for advanced dancers.

I've gotten into conversations with folks about public advanced dances lately as well. To be clear, I'm not talking about private parties, dance weekends, many one-off techno contras, or all-day days of dance (all of which tend to self-select for advanced dancers). I'm referring to the regular nights of dancing (~3 hours) that are publicly advertised, but are advertised as "experienced dancers only please; new dancers are welcome next week" types of things.

I'm actually wondering a bit about their existence in the first place. I have yet to hear a reason for them (and here's where y'all can help me) that doesn't boil down to some variant of, "...because dancing with newbies sucks."

It's also entirely possible that I'm missing something here, and that there is an angle of this that I have overlooked entirely. (I hope so; I'm having a viscerally negative reaction to the reason cited above.)

So I'm using one of the perks of being a blogger and crowd-sourcing this for my own edification: if you're in favor of publicly-advertised "advanced-dancer only" dances, could you kindly clarify why? I want to see both sides of it.

Full disclosure: Steve and I did not go to the one-off "advanced dance" at Glen Echo last month, but that was more a result of its happening when we had other stuff going on than really a conscious choice either way (beyond "we are not cancelling our previously-made plans in order to attend").

Flourishers Take Note

5/7/2013

Through most of our flourish videos, we've made a point of flagging points where you, or your partner, should be careful to make sure that everyone enjoys the flourish. Some of the warnings fall into broad categories, so we figured we should reiterate them here; flourishing is both an art and a science, and the science bit has some pretty clear guidelines in place.

Here are some of the times when you really ought to consider whether or not big flourishes are such a good idea, even when your partner is willing:

The Other Side of the Coin

1/16/2013

I was poking around online and ran across some of CDSS's archives. Specifically, I came across Mary McNab Dart's 1995 Contra Dance Choreography, which made for an interesting look at the contra dance tradition. It was written by a traditionalist (I imagine her reaction to the existence of a techno contra might include the clutching of pearls in horror) but she makes several interesting points over the course of her book.

The one I'd like to talk about today, though, is the following:

"Another way in which the new choreography relates to the attitudes of the experienced dancers is that the emphasis on the dance as sport, and the interest in challenging and complex dancing—the focus, in short, on the dance movements themselves rather than on the event as a social occasion—means that partners are chosen as often for their skill level as for their social attributes."

While I see the point that I think she's attempting to make -- the one where elitism means that new dancers are left out in the cold -- the point she ends up making comes off as a bit snobby. "...Partners are chosen as often for their skill level as for their social attributes." And what of those folks who might be a bit geeky, a bit nerdy, a bit shy -- but happen to be really amazing dancers? Interestingly, in my five and a half years of dancing I've actually found that choosing some (not all, but certainly some) dance partners based on their skill has actually let me get to know more people than I might have gotten to know had I met them any other way, as dance gave me an opening to talk to them. And I don't see this as a bad thing at all. On the dance floor, you don't have to be the most charming, or the most charismatic, or the best looking, or the most extroverted to get a partner...you just need to be willing to dance, and while with any activity, it's usually more fun when it comes easily to you or you're willing to try, skill is still not entirely necessary.

Dart makes a similar point about how dance has become a sport rather than a social event, and how this is a negative influence on the community:

"When I started dancing, participants tended to dress for a dance party, wearing nice looking dresses and shirts and shoes. There is a growing trend today to wear sports clothing—shorts, tank tops, sweat bands, tennis shoes—and even to bring a small towel with which to dry off once in a while, and a change of T-shirt."

Sorry, but I'm not sure I see this one as such a bad thing, either (especially the bringing changes of T-shirts to change into when the first is sweated through part). If I'm not so concerned about dressing up, I can eschew the high heels and the fancy and impractical clothes in exchange for a more mundane sort of pleasure -- the one where I can be myself and come and be social while being comfortable, dangit. Somehow I've managed to make several friends on the dance floor -- and off of it, when I've gone to sit with folks during a break from dancing and chatted with them. Somehow, I've managed to find a way. I also managed to find some aerobic activity that got me out of the house and has, either directly or indirectly, managed to be the cause of my meeting lots of interesting and fun people that I hang out with away from the contra floor as well as on it. To me this feels like it's become a sport of sorts and a social activity, rather than instead of a social activity, granted with a different aesthetic than it had in previous decades.

While there are some valid points that I feel that Ms. Dart makes, it seems like she's limiting herself to seeing these things only happen in a given aesthetic, rather than looking at what is actually happening. No doubt there are people out there who only view contra dance as a form of exercise, who are only looking for the next big thing, and who won't give anyone the time of day unless they're already a supremely skilled dancer. And yes, I'll agree that those sorts of people are not assets to the dance community as a whole. But there are a lot of other people who embrace the power of and, who love the fact that modern contra dance is in some ways challenging and has a bunch of people who come as they are in comfortable clothes rather than in fancy finery (assuming those two are mutually exclusive, which is a different train of thought altogether) and who can come and dance with lots of people and be welcomed even if they aren't the most socially adept; and there are those who find that aesthetic more appealing than any event where the only focus is on the social graces of the participants.

RIP Contra Sonic: The FSGW Monthly Series

12/19/2012

The last installment of Washington, DC’s Contra Sonic series is on Thursday, December 20, with a “Dark Side of the Earth” theme. It started as a monthly series in November of 2010 and was the source of several of my caller interviews and the home techno contra of dJ improper.

Some folks will say that the series failed, because it’s needed to evolve into a more sporadic, event-based format to be profitable for those involved.

I disagree.

"Don't Mess With Tradition!" *

10/9/2012

So it appears that I've touched a couple of nerves when I made an offhand comment about quibbling with the "lady" and "gent" labels (or rather, the baggage I feel those terms carry) and it brings up a larger question, and one that actually brings in some other contra dance variants (techno contras, flourishes borrowed from other dances, and gender-free dances among them):

At what point does a variant on a tradition become not part of that anymore, and become its own thing? There are those who argue that "lead" and "follow" divorce contra from being a community dance (and others who feel that while "lady" and "gent" aren't perfect, there aren't really better alternatives as yet). Others might argue that having itinerant musicians and callers from elsewhere coming in (which seems to happen frequently, especially in the bigger contra dance communities) makes it less of a "community" dance. Or if you don't have a fiddle in your band, or happen to use a synthesizer to loop your sounds, you're not really in the realm of "contra" anymore.

Most of the people I've talked to on this blog -- with a few exceptions, granted -- count techno contras as still part of the contra dance tradition, even if it's one they don't especially care for.

So where's the line? At what point does contra not become contra anymore? Or is any possible deviation -- from an uneven (e.g., with true "actives" and "inactives"), proper, heterosexually-paired, flourishless dance done to live music with precisely one fiddle and no brass -- somehow no longer "contra?"

(To me it seems like we're starting to get away from strictly "traditional" contra, but then again I don't really see that as bad as last time I checked we were in the 21st century, rather than the 18th. Evolving and elastic traditions are not inherently bad, in my book, but I'm curious about yours.)

*(And yes, the blog title is a shout-out to the Foggy Bottom Morris Men's mummer's play callback.)

Authenticity & Manipulation of the Tradition

8/21/2012

"Even inside the music itself there's a little moral code, I think, that's kind of built into it, kind of an artistic kind of morality we call it, or set of codes or what have you. It's like knowing the line between what's authentic and sincere, and what's manipulative and...what's not authentic. I mean, both for yourself in terms of something that's sincerely felt, and I think music being felt is probably the main thing, and that it be sincerely felt. Because, you can almost play anything if it's really true for you, you know? I'm probably long past being authentically East Clare...but being authentically East Clare at this point in my life is not as important as it was when I was 25. So being authentically musical, inside the tradition, is probably where I'm at now, and that encompasses a lot more than it did when I was starting out...."

--transcribed from Martin Hayes, "Sincerely Felt" track on Gerry Diver's The Speech Project album

I was listening to The Speech Project one day last week and my brain stuck on this passage from the track. (As mentioned elsewhere in this blog, The Speech Project is an album where Irish musicians were interviewed and the musical qualities of the recordings of their voices were used to arrange orchestral pieces.)

While Hayes is speaking here about playing traditional Irish music, I think to some degree it holds true for other traditional genres as well. I'm specifically thinking of contra here, and the ways in which the newer infusions are in their own ways authentic to the time in which we live, and yet still fall under the umbrella of the Tradition -- or at least, ostensibly they do, and this is what has created some interesting tensions within the community.

Fellow syncretists would argue that the new iterations do in fact fall under the "authentically musical, inside the tradition" idea. Detractors, on the other hand, would claim that pandering to modern tastes falls into the "manipulative and...not authentic" camp. But that implies, to me, that the purists think that syncretists are out to intentionally destroy the tradition for some as-yet-unarticulated reason. (For any purists out there, I would be genuinely interested to have a civil discussion about theories, started with the understanding that we are likely to agree to disagree at the end.)

Pondering Principles

7/2/2012

One of the reasons that some people see alt contras as a threat to the Tradition, rather than an extension of it, is the idea that somehow using any prerecorded sound will kill off the demand for live musicians of any ilk. For these people, live music isn't an aesthetic preference but almost a moral issue to defend on principle. (As has been made clear several times on this blog, I love both, for different reasons; I am also personally more concerned with the principle of community coming together than the principle of the source of the music with which they are joined.)

I came across this article on EDM while waiting for my train to Massachusetts this weekend and saw several parallels to the contra dance community's ongoing debate. It reminded me of some of the comments I've heard made about alt contras relative to this blog, especially the variants of, "I will never hire a DJ; they're lovely people, I'm sure, but they can't react in the moment to the room the way a musician can."

Let's put aside for a moment the erroneous assumption that there is no skill to DJing well -- even if you mix your tracks ahead of time, you still need to edit most of them for length, if not for speed and phrasing and that most certainly does take effort and skill), I do think that this complaint ought to be addressed. Some groups, like Double Apex, Phase X, and Firecloud address this by blending live and prerecorded sound; Perpetual e-Motion dodges the bullet entirely by clearing the loop machine before every gig and mixing their live sounds on the fly. Some DJs can get around this by freestyling through the entire dance, complete with the sort of phrasing and coming in armed only with samples. I would love to see more of that (and suspect we will as the genre evolves; we aren't to where this is the norm right now) but I also recognize that it requires something akin to the skill of memorizing several of Shakespeare's sonnets and reproducing them almost perfectly at the drop of a hat -- and then watching the crowd and well enough to vary the timbre of your voice to match at the same time. It's not an impossible task, but still a rather tall order.

One of the interesting things to watch with a fringe genre is what happens when it hits the relative mainstream. What do you see happening? Or, the bigger question, where do you see this all fitting in the years to come? Do conditions exist (even hypothetically) wherein an alternative contra could speak to a hard-line traditionalist whose issue with prerecorded music is moral rather than aesthetic?

Blogger's Soapbox: Order and Chaos and Contra Flourishes

3/11/2012

One of the things that tends to give contra flourishers a bad name is when they are, as one dancer once put it to me, "all flourish and no dance:" i.e., the dancer completely, utterly, and intentionally ignores the phrasing of the dance to the point that it interferes with other dancers' enjoyment. This is rather unfortunate, because it can be done otherwise, and in a way that only involves the dancers who consent to it. For me, to be perfectly honest, swinging the exact same way every single time through a dance, and having the exact same connection, the exact same relationship with everyone in the line seems disingenuous.

Blogger's Soapbox: Why?

12/28/2011

"There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open up a vein." -- Walter Smith

Many people take this time of year to not only be a festive period with tinsel and lit candles and gifts, but also a time to reflect on the waning of the year and its happenings.

When I was writing up Terra Price's interview the other week, I was reminded of a question I was asked in the beginning of this little project (that has since taken on a life of its own): the question of why I would want to observe -- and perhaps even celebrate -- the encroachment of electronic music and other traditions on our beloved contra dance. Oddly enough, what makes me love this hybrid form is in fact that encroachment.

Blogger's Soapbox: Crossover Contra as Clubbing for Folkies

8/3/2011

One of the advantages of maintaining a blog is the ability to drag out the soap box every now and then.

Specifically, I want to address my viewpoint on a common complaint about this whole crossover contra thing, that somehow crossover contra "isn't really contra dancing" because it uses non-traditional music.