(A Guest Post by Steven “Trouble” Roth.)

One expects to hear certain kinds of music when at a folk festival. While at the Washington Folk Festival this past weekend I quickly found myself immersed in many different styles, from Bluegrass to Balalaikas to Blues to Balkan. As I came around a certain corner of Glen Echo Park this past Sunday afternoon, however, instead of banjos I heard beatboxing.

Meet Christylez Bacon. On the surface, all you might see is a straight-up hip-hop artist who’s flow and playfulness is eerily reminiscent of Andre 3000. You might ask yourself (as I did, however fleetingly), “What’s a hip-hop artist doing at a folk festival?” But look again: that’s a string section backing him up on stage. They are the Washington Sound Museum (his back-up band), with one person playing an electric violin and another on electric cello. Over the next several numbers, he shows that he’s just as comfortable on guitar and djembe as he is improvising rhymes using words shouted out by the audience. It is quickly apparent that this guy is extremely talented. In this somewhat unexpected venue, he appears completely at ease and in his element. He gets this crowd, and the audience responds to that. This is a performer who is completely at home at a folk festival.

Make no mistake -- Christylez Bacon IS a hip-hop artist. He is a born-and-bred native of Washington, DC and you can tell when you hear him lay out a beat on his djembe that go-go music runs in his blood. His musical “mentor” is none other than local luminary Bomani Armah. (You don’t recognize the name? He’s also known as D’Mite, who achieved viral success with his “Read a [M************] Book.” Google it, but not at work or around small ears -- the language in the song is decidedly NSFW.) He also fully embraces 21st-century methods for his craft, running his show off of his iPad on stage, complete with mixing mic levels, looping tracks, and playing beat tracks while his hands are busy playing guitar.

But is it folk? Oh yes. When it comes down to it, Christylez is an extremely organic performer. While his music starts with hip-hop as its foundation, he is also eager to include elements of many other styles of music in his performance as evidenced by the fiddle and cello additions. He struck me as the kind of music nerd who could sit down and enjoy any music you put in front of him, no matter the genre (and maybe even improvise the style into his next performance). Most importantly , however, is just how present he is with his audience while he performs. When I saw him perform, I saw something magical happen; he has the ability to bring in all of the audience members and make them feel like they are part of the music as it is being created. The performance would have been a different thing had any one person in the audience been added or taken away. In that moment, he created music that will never occur the same way again because it was the product of that unique moment in time and those people who happened to be present.

Sounds like folk music to me.

When I arrived at the festival, I had not been expecting to hear rap or hip-hop being performed. To be honest, it is not a musical genre that I had ever directly associated with the folk tradition in my own thinking. However, by including live instrumentation and by bringing the audience into his performance in a participatory manner, I see this falling under the same umbrella of folk music. He may have taken a different path to get there than we are used to seeing, but he does get to the same place; I am reminded of how DJs and other artists have been approaching crossover contras from paths that are different from the usual acoustic bands, but it is still undoubtedly contra.

Steven is talent in the 100+ ContraSycretist YouTube Friday Flourish videos and is a former member of the Folklore Society of Greater Washington's board. Many thanks to him for sharing his insights!

Christylez Bacon's web site may be found at www.christylez.com.

I'm still recovering from my trip to Atlanta, GA for Catapult! 2013 over Memorial Day weekend; it was great to meet a lot of you for the first time or for the nth time and to dance with a lot of you. I got there late on Friday night and went to go add some flyers to the flyer table and this sight greeted me:

I didn't have to bring my own stash this time, someone else had beaten me to it (or at least, saved some of last year's stack)!

You, too, can be part of Contra Syncretist's street team!

• print and take this flyer to dances (PDF format);
• like us on Facebook to keep up to date on new techo contra events when I hear about them;
• subscribe to the YouTube channel to be the first to know when we post new flourishes (i.e., come back from hiatus);
• promote us in your dance community;
• link to relevant ContraSyncretist entries in other spots; and
  
• chime in when you have opinions; a lot of what makes this site lots of fun for me (and hopefully for you) is the ongoing conversation.

Onward!

Seattle, WA-based photographer Doug Plummer has been involved in the contra dance community since the 1980s and has been documenting it for about as long. In 2011, he started publishing calendars of his work. I met Doug at Contra Evolution II in 2012 (and, full disclosure, I've contributed to his Kickstarter for the 2014 edition of the calendar) and recently talked to him about his photography and the calendar project.

"Actually, the idea came from my designer, Joanne Laterjung Kelly, who wanted to use my photos in her promo calendar," says Doug. "I wouldn't let her crop my images, and I said no. A year later I got her involved in making the calendar I wanted. I think a big part of the appeal of the calendar is how well it's designed."

I asked Doug about the photos he takes. "The motion thing is a leftover from my film days. You shoot at a slow shutter speed. The key, though, is to move the camera with the action. Pan with someone as they're moving across the line, so that they're sharper than the background, which gets blurred from the movement. If something in the frame looks kinda sharp, then the photo looks sharp." (N.B.: he has also posted a tutorial on the Kickstarter page entitled, "How To Take Dance Photos That Don't Suck -- The Video.")

He also adds, "Personality is bursting out all over on a dance floor, I don't have to try very hard [to find it]. I often hone in on one dancer in a line that seems to be exuding life and energy and love and all that, and kinda stalk them."

Further, the venue contributes to the photography as well: "Venue is personality. I always back up and make sure I get a hall shot with a wide lens. Sometimes it's the quality of light, and daytime dances in a hall with windows makes that quality come to the fore. I just shot in a gorgeous hall in Clarkdale, Arizona, windows on both sides, great backlight any direction you looked. Any photo in there is going to be imbued with the personality of that hall."

So, will the 2014 calendar include photos of crossover contras?

"Yes, I will have a month in the calendar showcasing the techno dance community. Shooting at a techno dance stretches the technology of image capture. It's dark, it's impossible to focus, and a flash would wreck the ambiance and annoy the dancers even more than it already does. I'm using high end pro gear, shooting at ISO 24,000, and it's hard. I love it."

This time around, Doug is taking a new approach to fundraising and selling his calendars. "Kickstarter saved this project. This is the third year of the calendar, and the 2nd time I've crowdsourced the support. First time I did it as a traditional retail product and got bit badly, lost a ton of money. Last year I raised about two-thirds of the production funds on Kickstarter, and tried to make up the difference with retail sales. I almost did, too. This year it's entirely a pre-buy project. I'm not going to have a retail option after the fact, except for the CDSS store. They will be the only way to order a calendar after it's printed."

He continues, "That the project is crowdsourced has changed my relationship to it, and to my sense of who the work is for. It's really a project of the dancers and the musicians and the organizers now. Kickstarter has fostered this wonderful sense of social indebtedness, that I have made a contract to fulfill this project that a community has entrusted me with. I feel closer to the dance community than ever before."

Doug continues, "When I started dancing and taking photos of dance, in the late 80's, it was a photographic problem for me to solve: how do I get a compelling image in a dynamic, difficult environment? This was with low ISO film, and it was a hard thing to do. That sensibility lingers--I'm after a great image, it just happens to be of this subject. But as I've become more deeply engaged in the dance community (thanks to the calendar, and social media), I feel more keenly that I'm a documentarian, and that I'm doing this for the community. The subject is becoming the important element now. "

A New York dancer recently posted this on the "Stuff Contra Dancers Say..." community on Facebook, but I feel like it should get more publicity. This is a piece on dancing on bad floors, which is something that I think all of us have had to do at one point or another (and you can't always tell by looking, unless it's an outdoor dance on concrete, which can be fun for many reasons but the quality of the dancing surface is not one of them).

Steve and I both have "backup" dance shoes that we use on less-slippery floors, and I have occasionally been known to dance in sneakers when I can't seem to keep my feet under me. Fortunately I don't remember needing those on the floor in Atlanta for the Catapult! Showcase, where I will be off dancing this weekend to Uncle Farmer, Coracree, Steam!, Free Raisins, Waxing, and Ladies at Play, and the calling of Quena Crain, Kristin Seibert, Luke Donforth, Tavi Merrill, JoLaine Jones-Pokorney, and Keith Tuxhorn. Save me a dance....

One of the things that particularly gained steam last summer was the issue of safety when dealing with contra dance, especially when it came to members of the community feeling harassed. This seems to have been covered quite a bit in other communities, but less so in the contra community as a whole. (There were some resources out there -- of which that link is an example -- but very few were directed at contra dancers specifically.) Fortunately, since then, there seems to have been an increased awareness of dancer safety and policies intended to protect dancers from harm. There are also communities, such as this one on Facebook, that have sprung up online to discuss this important topic, which affects all of the contra community whether they're dancing to traditional music or techno.

Interestingly, other communities seem to have had more experience dealing with this directly; creepers are not exclusive to the contra dance community, but perhaps in this case we can work with other communities to be less naive.

(I also find the creeper link interesting because contra culture has folks looking into your eyes frequently, which is described as possible creeper behavior in the swing community...but this, too, ought to be negotiable if it makes your partner feel uncomfortable...look at their ear, or their forehead....)

One of the great things about the community aspect of the folk community is how it translates to the Internet now that it has become so pervasive:

Kickstarter: unsurprisingly, this crowdfunding resource is being used toward funding folkie projects as well such as Doug Plummer's 2014 Contra Dance Calendar.

Dance Video Archive: This site, which seems to be run by Bob Green, crowdsources videos of CDSS member organizations' dances.

Various entries to Wikis (such as this one on Wikia) and crowdsourced attempts to identify dancers/band members in photos help to chronicle the ongoing contra dance movement and keep the community aspect of this even in the digital age. I find it very interesting that while the times have changed, the values and community norms do not seem to have changed very much at all.

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:

I was reading Slate the other day and found this in their "Vault" column. The reason I'm including it here is because this 1817 dance tip sheet is actually a forerunner to the idea behind the Friday Flourishes, where dancers could have easy reference to bringing their fancy steps onto the dance floor, and a way to refresh their memories before an event.

(I suppose a true analog would be if someone streamed the YouTube series on their smartphone mid-dance, but that also might violate our "don't be a jerk" principle.)

In any case, it seems to show that even as technology evolves, some functions remain very similar even as the media change.

...because what's May Day without morris dancing?

I was talking to a dancer friend of mine recently about gender balancing and how, in her opinion, younger women get shafted by this, because most of the younger women are more willing to dance with each other if there's a shortage. As a result, in some ways gender balancing might make a weekend less accessible, even if it's trying to make it more accessible by ensuring that men and women have equal opportunities to dance with each other. (Incidentally, this person was a young female dancer who is comfortable dancing either role, and does dance both roles very well.) 

Part of the reason that Steve and I started registering for events as a couple was to avoid having me languish on a waitlist because not enough single* gents registered in a timely manner to balance my registering as a single* lady.  The other argument that I've heard come up in favor of gender balancing is that older women, who may be less willing to dance with other women, "need" to have men to dance with, so a policy of gender balancing helps older women.

I'm not sure I buy this argument, but when I fall into the relevant demographic I might reevaluate my stance based on the facts on the ground. The "Stuff Contra Dancers Say..." community on Facebook has covered this particular topic exhaustively, so I'm not going to reiterate here, but I will mention it for the sake of completion of the current picture. 

On the registration form for Contra Colours weekend in October (which, by the way, Steve and I are planning to attend), it asked not for gender but which parts you were comfortable dancing, with an option for "both." It looked like they were trying to role-balance, rather than gender-balance. It may turn out that by role-balancing, they also gender-balance, but I found this approach to be rather inspired. 

What are your opinions on this? I don't tend to find that gender balancing (or the lack thereof) makes life easier or harder -- I have been to gender-balanced events where I have had a devil of a time finding a partner even when I was actively asking others (they were booked, or didn't want to dance with another lady), and to non-gender-balanced events where I've had my pick of partners. For my part, I am much more bothered by booking ahead 5 dances than I am by what the gender of the person I'm dancing with is, but that's me and I'm aware that there are other opinions out there. 

 *(for purposes of the dance weekend, not necessarily for their personal lives)