I first met Penelope Weinberger, Dance Chair of the Folklore Society of Greater Washington (FSGW), when one of my friends joined the Board. I have had the pleasure of knowing her not only in that capacity, but also as a friend who does awesome things like being the DC side of the organization of Contrastock I and II and the creator of the Contra Sonic alt music contra series, the first monthly series of its kind, in November 2010.
“I wanted to have the first series,” she says. “I knew that other people were doing special events and one-offs and I wanted an ongoing series. I also wanted our alt music series to not be an exclusive thing. The first alternative contras were by invitation only and those were...the music and the calling were both recorded ahead of time, and for me that wasn’t what contra dancing is about.”
“I wanted to have the first series,” she says. “I knew that other people were doing special events and one-offs and I wanted an ongoing series. I also wanted our alt music series to not be an exclusive thing. The first alternative contras were by invitation only and those were...the music and the calling were both recorded ahead of time, and for me that wasn’t what contra dancing is about.”
Fortunately, she had a willing DJ (Jeremiah Seligman, who was not yet dJ improper) and an FSGW board that went along with her plan. “There was some pushback from the Board,” she mentions, “but for the most part they’ve gone along with it. I’m the Dance Chair, this is part of my role.” For Penelope, it was important to have FSGW’s backing; they help by providing insurance, publicity, and other logistical supports. “It’s important to have an organization backing you because it’s really hard to be a dance organizer without that -- I know a lot of dance organizers who don’t have that -- there’s insurance, publicity, and that sort of stuff.”
“I think at the beginning, a lot of people tried [Contra Sonic] out to see what it
was, and came once or twice and decided it was or wasn’t for them...it has not
done what I had hoped it would do, which is introduce new people to contra
dancing that would then also come to regular dances. It has happened a little
bit, but not as much as I had hoped. At Artisphere we got a handful of new
people each time, and they did seem to be coming back to the Sonic, although I
haven’t seen them at Glen Echo.”
“I have a lot of philosophies about what contra dancing is, and how in some
respects it’s really different from the club scene, and more of a safe
place...you can leave your glass of water, and it will still be there when you
come back, un-tampered with. This has also been the dance where, when we’ve had young people try to bring their friends and get shot down because they think it’s ‘too dorky,’ this is the dance where they might be convinced to come try it. They might be overwhelmed, because contra dancing can be pretty overwhelming the first time, but it can also be an environment where you could just freestyle, if the contra dancing part is still too dorky...I mean, I have no
problem whatsoever, if I don’t feel like doing a contra, going out on the floor
at a Contra Sonic and just dancing in the back of the hall, and there’s room to
do that at these dances. And I think after I started doing that, more people
felt more comfortable doing that too.... So that could be less intimidating than
contra where if you’re in the line, you’re in it, and you need to be there until
the end."
“At the same time, we don’t have as many people who didn’t know about contra dancing come to it, and I think that’s partly because of the way it’s marketed...we use the usual channels, the FSGW newsletter and the web site and we also do an independent flyer for it and announce it at other dances and a Facebook group. I would like it if there was more of an organization behind it at a college or something that would bring it back to campus...I think that’s our target market here.”
As time has gone on, the series format has gotten a few tweaks. “So one of the
things I’ve done that I think has been different from other series, and I
haven’t been to a whole lot of other series, but one thing that we’ve done
differently is that the music has been continuous. Not a medley, but like I
persuaded dJ improper to start playing ‘taxi music’ -- the dance comes to an
end, and you know the dance has come to an end, but right away there’s this
low-level swing piece that keeps the energy going and the music and the momentum of the dance going through the course of the evening.”
“I’m club raised,” Penelope continues. “I worked at clubs in college, and I would stay out dancing until 5 in the morning, and then go dance until 11 in the
morning, and go home and go to bed, and get up and go to work at 4 in the
afternoon, and that was my life.... So I have a way that I think clubbing works,
and it definitely has to do with continuous noise and continuous music, and I’m all about cranking up the bass.... We used to have deaf people come to the clubs when I was coming up and they would be able to dance to the beat in the
floorboards. And I like to think of Contra Sonic as a place that a deaf person
could be able to dance...I mean it’s harder with the calling, but with the
music....”
After a few months, the series relocated from the Glen Echo Park Spanish Ballroom Annex to Artisphere, a performing and visual arts space across the Potomac in the Rosslyn neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia. This change boasted more access to and from the dance through public transportation (a feature that Glen Echo Park, regrettably, lacks) and an intimate dance space with a built-in clubby lighting setup available.
Penelope explains, “We already had the relationship with FSGW and Glen Echo. Artisphere was a new venue, and FSGW and Artisphere wanted to collaborate. It has a club space and so the choice to relocate had to do with that and it had this club feel, with low lighting that would promote the club feel.”
The series has mostly transitioned back to the Spanish Ballroom’s Annex, but the December 2012 installment will be on a different night at Artisphere.
“Unfortunately, Artisphere is not as available as we would like it to be.
Because of the way the space is laid out, we can’t have a dance when the
adjacent theater is being used, which wasn’t a problem when we were having our events on Tuesdays but then Tuesdays became unavailable, so we’ve been trying to find other nights to do it there, but since it’s a regular series I wanted a regular time and that became difficult. So we’re moved back to Glen Echo last
April and then we tried some Saturdays, but there’s too much going on on
Saturdays and attendance dropped drastically. My vision was that I wanted it to be huge and fill up the [Spanish] Ballroom, but the Annex can quite comfortably hold 100 people for this kind of dancing, and it feels crowded, but at the same time to get the club feel and the coziness of it, the Annex is a better space than the Ballroom. The Ballroom is really too big of a space unless we have like 250 dancers to get the club thing going on.”
“I think the series has been a mixed thing, on the whole. One of the most positive things has been that the callers really like how we do things. I’ve been able to convince callers who may have had a bit of trepidation going in and callers have mostly seemed to like working with dJ improper and how much work he puts into it, how attentive he is to dancers and how careful he is about the music that he picks. And something interesting I’ve seen in the videos of him working, and of course I’ve seen him when he plays, is it looks like he’s just up there pushing a button, but he does as much work as musicians do before the
dance...you know, obviously musicians get together and they practice, and [dJ
improper] will put so much work into it before the three hours of the
dance...it’s a huge amount of work. And I think some people understand that, but a lot of people don’t. I mean I think a lot of dancers don’t understand how much work it is to be a musician, either. He’s not an iPod. That’s something that’s really important about this series, too...I’ve heard of a lot of series where
the music doesn’t fit, and there’s a lot of hash calling...I’m not about that. I
like that the music is square and the right speed, the right length...."
Penelope continues, "Unfortunately, after two years it seems a regular series is not flourishing here in DC, so we are going back to a special event format, our next two dances will be the 2nd anniversary of the series, on Tuesday November 13th at Glen Echo Ballroom Annex and then back for a reprise at Artisphere on Thursday, December 20th for a Special Sonic Solstice. I’m talking to Will Mentor about doing a dance in May, 2013, that could well be the next one after December’s Dark Side of the
Earth Dance.”
What advice does Penelope have for others who might want to organize an alternative music contra series? “Be conscious about the music, and...you know, we have a really different dance community here in Washington than a lot of people have, and our dances are bigger than a lot of people’s big dances, and we get 50, 60, 70 people on a Tuesday night at a Contra Sonic and I’m wondering, ‘where is everybody?’ and that’s actually a pretty big dance.... So, I guess my advice is just to help people understand what it is, that the dances should be simple, I think, and it’s not a place for a caller to bust out their most difficult dances.... But at the same time, a lot of the dancers who come to these are advanced dancers and I’ve seen some neat things happen.... I saw someone call ‘Chorus Jig’ at one of these for instance, and that’s kind of fun to see people
‘Strip the Willow’ at an alternative contra dance but you don’t see it as
much.”
“I don’t see this as its own separate thing, I mean I am forever asking the callers who come through town to be calling this thing too, and to get the touring callers, and getting our local callers in, and we promote this dance at the regular dance, and we promote the regular dance at the techno dance, and you know, I see it as an evolution of the tradition, and the tradition is always
evolving.... There are places where they do ‘chestnut nights,’ and while we
don’t do that [at Glen Echo] -- although I have dancers here who say that we
should require that callers call them at least once in a half -- and then there
are other people who wonder why they would want that. I am not about what is
sacred, because I don’t think that anything is sacred about social dancing and
dancing and community is not going to be forced. If I hadn’t done this series,
someone would have. I mean, 435 people came to the old time square dance last April, and a bunch of them had never danced before and it was this fun laid back Saturday evening, with potluck drinking and the lighting is bright and it’s fun....I think that the urban square, even though it’s from a more traditional place from Appalachian squares is also an evolution of that kind of dancing. I think that Glen Echo is constantly evolving....we have younger bands like the Sligo Creek Stompers and the Free Raisins and Giant Robot Dance and when you look at Elixir, a band with a brass section, I mean this is all the continuing evolution of contra dancing. I think alt music contra is traditional dancing to non-traditional music -- or at least it’s from a different tradition. It’s the red-headed stepchild; still a member of the family even if some of the family members don’t want to acknowledge it. Just because it’s the black sheep doesn’t mean it’s going to stop thriving or doing its own thing.”
“I think at the beginning, a lot of people tried [Contra Sonic] out to see what it
was, and came once or twice and decided it was or wasn’t for them...it has not
done what I had hoped it would do, which is introduce new people to contra
dancing that would then also come to regular dances. It has happened a little
bit, but not as much as I had hoped. At Artisphere we got a handful of new
people each time, and they did seem to be coming back to the Sonic, although I
haven’t seen them at Glen Echo.”
“I have a lot of philosophies about what contra dancing is, and how in some
respects it’s really different from the club scene, and more of a safe
place...you can leave your glass of water, and it will still be there when you
come back, un-tampered with. This has also been the dance where, when we’ve had young people try to bring their friends and get shot down because they think it’s ‘too dorky,’ this is the dance where they might be convinced to come try it. They might be overwhelmed, because contra dancing can be pretty overwhelming the first time, but it can also be an environment where you could just freestyle, if the contra dancing part is still too dorky...I mean, I have no
problem whatsoever, if I don’t feel like doing a contra, going out on the floor
at a Contra Sonic and just dancing in the back of the hall, and there’s room to
do that at these dances. And I think after I started doing that, more people
felt more comfortable doing that too.... So that could be less intimidating than
contra where if you’re in the line, you’re in it, and you need to be there until
the end."
“At the same time, we don’t have as many people who didn’t know about contra dancing come to it, and I think that’s partly because of the way it’s marketed...we use the usual channels, the FSGW newsletter and the web site and we also do an independent flyer for it and announce it at other dances and a Facebook group. I would like it if there was more of an organization behind it at a college or something that would bring it back to campus...I think that’s our target market here.”
As time has gone on, the series format has gotten a few tweaks. “So one of the
things I’ve done that I think has been different from other series, and I
haven’t been to a whole lot of other series, but one thing that we’ve done
differently is that the music has been continuous. Not a medley, but like I
persuaded dJ improper to start playing ‘taxi music’ -- the dance comes to an
end, and you know the dance has come to an end, but right away there’s this
low-level swing piece that keeps the energy going and the music and the momentum of the dance going through the course of the evening.”
“I’m club raised,” Penelope continues. “I worked at clubs in college, and I would stay out dancing until 5 in the morning, and then go dance until 11 in the
morning, and go home and go to bed, and get up and go to work at 4 in the
afternoon, and that was my life.... So I have a way that I think clubbing works,
and it definitely has to do with continuous noise and continuous music, and I’m all about cranking up the bass.... We used to have deaf people come to the clubs when I was coming up and they would be able to dance to the beat in the
floorboards. And I like to think of Contra Sonic as a place that a deaf person
could be able to dance...I mean it’s harder with the calling, but with the
music....”
After a few months, the series relocated from the Glen Echo Park Spanish Ballroom Annex to Artisphere, a performing and visual arts space across the Potomac in the Rosslyn neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia. This change boasted more access to and from the dance through public transportation (a feature that Glen Echo Park, regrettably, lacks) and an intimate dance space with a built-in clubby lighting setup available.
Penelope explains, “We already had the relationship with FSGW and Glen Echo. Artisphere was a new venue, and FSGW and Artisphere wanted to collaborate. It has a club space and so the choice to relocate had to do with that and it had this club feel, with low lighting that would promote the club feel.”
The series has mostly transitioned back to the Spanish Ballroom’s Annex, but the December 2012 installment will be on a different night at Artisphere.
“Unfortunately, Artisphere is not as available as we would like it to be.
Because of the way the space is laid out, we can’t have a dance when the
adjacent theater is being used, which wasn’t a problem when we were having our events on Tuesdays but then Tuesdays became unavailable, so we’ve been trying to find other nights to do it there, but since it’s a regular series I wanted a regular time and that became difficult. So we’re moved back to Glen Echo last
April and then we tried some Saturdays, but there’s too much going on on
Saturdays and attendance dropped drastically. My vision was that I wanted it to be huge and fill up the [Spanish] Ballroom, but the Annex can quite comfortably hold 100 people for this kind of dancing, and it feels crowded, but at the same time to get the club feel and the coziness of it, the Annex is a better space than the Ballroom. The Ballroom is really too big of a space unless we have like 250 dancers to get the club thing going on.”
“I think the series has been a mixed thing, on the whole. One of the most positive things has been that the callers really like how we do things. I’ve been able to convince callers who may have had a bit of trepidation going in and callers have mostly seemed to like working with dJ improper and how much work he puts into it, how attentive he is to dancers and how careful he is about the music that he picks. And something interesting I’ve seen in the videos of him working, and of course I’ve seen him when he plays, is it looks like he’s just up there pushing a button, but he does as much work as musicians do before the
dance...you know, obviously musicians get together and they practice, and [dJ
improper] will put so much work into it before the three hours of the
dance...it’s a huge amount of work. And I think some people understand that, but a lot of people don’t. I mean I think a lot of dancers don’t understand how much work it is to be a musician, either. He’s not an iPod. That’s something that’s really important about this series, too...I’ve heard of a lot of series where
the music doesn’t fit, and there’s a lot of hash calling...I’m not about that. I
like that the music is square and the right speed, the right length...."
Penelope continues, "Unfortunately, after two years it seems a regular series is not flourishing here in DC, so we are going back to a special event format, our next two dances will be the 2nd anniversary of the series, on Tuesday November 13th at Glen Echo Ballroom Annex and then back for a reprise at Artisphere on Thursday, December 20th for a Special Sonic Solstice. I’m talking to Will Mentor about doing a dance in May, 2013, that could well be the next one after December’s Dark Side of the
Earth Dance.”
What advice does Penelope have for others who might want to organize an alternative music contra series? “Be conscious about the music, and...you know, we have a really different dance community here in Washington than a lot of people have, and our dances are bigger than a lot of people’s big dances, and we get 50, 60, 70 people on a Tuesday night at a Contra Sonic and I’m wondering, ‘where is everybody?’ and that’s actually a pretty big dance.... So, I guess my advice is just to help people understand what it is, that the dances should be simple, I think, and it’s not a place for a caller to bust out their most difficult dances.... But at the same time, a lot of the dancers who come to these are advanced dancers and I’ve seen some neat things happen.... I saw someone call ‘Chorus Jig’ at one of these for instance, and that’s kind of fun to see people
‘Strip the Willow’ at an alternative contra dance but you don’t see it as
much.”
“I don’t see this as its own separate thing, I mean I am forever asking the callers who come through town to be calling this thing too, and to get the touring callers, and getting our local callers in, and we promote this dance at the regular dance, and we promote the regular dance at the techno dance, and you know, I see it as an evolution of the tradition, and the tradition is always
evolving.... There are places where they do ‘chestnut nights,’ and while we
don’t do that [at Glen Echo] -- although I have dancers here who say that we
should require that callers call them at least once in a half -- and then there
are other people who wonder why they would want that. I am not about what is
sacred, because I don’t think that anything is sacred about social dancing and
dancing and community is not going to be forced. If I hadn’t done this series,
someone would have. I mean, 435 people came to the old time square dance last April, and a bunch of them had never danced before and it was this fun laid back Saturday evening, with potluck drinking and the lighting is bright and it’s fun....I think that the urban square, even though it’s from a more traditional place from Appalachian squares is also an evolution of that kind of dancing. I think that Glen Echo is constantly evolving....we have younger bands like the Sligo Creek Stompers and the Free Raisins and Giant Robot Dance and when you look at Elixir, a band with a brass section, I mean this is all the continuing evolution of contra dancing. I think alt music contra is traditional dancing to non-traditional music -- or at least it’s from a different tradition. It’s the red-headed stepchild; still a member of the family even if some of the family members don’t want to acknowledge it. Just because it’s the black sheep doesn’t mean it’s going to stop thriving or doing its own thing.”
The next installments of Contra Sonic are TONIGHT (November 13, 2012) in the Spanish Ballroom, and the LAST ONE FOR A WHILE will be on Thursday, December 20, 2012 at Artisphere in Arlington (Rosslyn), VA. Special thanks to Penelope Weinberger for sitting down with me and for sharing her thoughts!
