When I was digging through my feed reader, I found this article from the Furman Theatre Arts blog, and aside from 1) thinking it was fabulous that someone else was looking at this kind of stuff (read: my little dance-geeky heart went squee!) and 2) thinking that the stuff the blogger pointed to would make excellent fodder for future blog entries here, I noticed something that I too have been guilty of in the past.
The author describes the tension between "tradition" and "innovation," and cites American techno contra as an intersection between the two. While the tension makes for compelling documentary film-making and (ahem) blog entries, something we don't tend to address very much is what the "new" forms of tradition have in common with the older ones...the changes/innovations make the new forms distinct, but what about the stuff they keep?
So with this in mind, I'm asking you all -- what do you currently see that's kept intact as contra dance interacts with other forms of dance and nontraditional music? What would you like to see kept intact going forward?
The author describes the tension between "tradition" and "innovation," and cites American techno contra as an intersection between the two. While the tension makes for compelling documentary film-making and (ahem) blog entries, something we don't tend to address very much is what the "new" forms of tradition have in common with the older ones...the changes/innovations make the new forms distinct, but what about the stuff they keep?
So with this in mind, I'm asking you all -- what do you currently see that's kept intact as contra dance interacts with other forms of dance and nontraditional music? What would you like to see kept intact going forward?
