11 Sep
2024
11 Sep
'24
4:41 p.m.
My first thought was that if flourishes/improvisation were what were driving men wearing
skirts, it’d result in more women wearing skirts too, which I haven’t noticed. But that
wouldn’t be true if the improv were a more male phenomenon. I don’t dance in enough venues
to be sure, but I kinda think that might be true. (It’s also quite possible I don’t dance
in enough venues to be sure women aren’t wearing skirts more.)
But I’m not convinced—people have enjoyed wearing skirts for contra long before a change
in style of dancing, because the older way of dancing allowed a skirt to move enjoyably
too. Certainly that was a major reason for why I (male) have worn skirts since I started
contra dancing in the early ‘80s, and lots of people (mostly female) who didn’t usually
wear skirts but did for contra said the same. It seems more likely to me that what’s
brought about the change is not the dancing but the guys—skirts were always fun to dance
in, and now men are less afraid of doing it themselves.
Read Weaver
Jamaica Plain, MA
http://lcfd.org
On Sep 11, 2024, at 1:54 PM, Louise Siddons via Contra
Callers <contracallers(a)lists.sharedweight.net> wrote:
Dear callers,
There isn’t a contra fashion email list, so I’m turning to this one since we all spend a
lot of time looking at dancers :)
Some of you may have seen the recent survey about dancing in skirts/skirts for dancing
that I helped a dancer friend create/disseminate:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfpgbzYSntTZlAgkNvfI8uhISstHGqhPpV…
— feel free to fill it out!
As we were writing up an article about the initial results that includes advice on
choosing skirts for dancing, aimed broadly to include all dancers, I made the following
unsubstantiated claim:
"These results suggest that for contra dancers, the primary benefit of a skirt is
the extent to which it extends, amplifies, and enhances the sensation of the dance –
particularly twirls and other flourishes. History bears this out: a more universal
adoption of flowing and flaring skirts among contra dancers, regardless of gender or prior
style preferences, coincided with the explosion of interest in flourishes and
improvisational elaboration of the basic dance form among contra dancers at the turn of
the 21st century.”
Robert challenged me on the second sentence, asking what evidence I had — and I freely
admitted I was extrapolating from my own lived experience, and had no proof that this was
broadly true. And before you all jump in, I will acknowledge that the phenomenon of
universal skirt-wearing, regardless of gender, also depended quite a lot on the changing
cultural discourse around masculinity — especially in socially progressive communities.
But I’m still interested in the hypothesis that there’s a choreographic/phenomenological
connection.
After all, progressive men have existed in the contra community for a long time and
haven’t (if video/photographic evidence is accurate) always worn skirts for dancing — so
we want to know, when did skirts become familiar enough on every gender that a (person
likely to be interpellated as a) man wearing a skirt was unsurprising?
Thanks for all respectful input,
Louise Siddons
Winchester, UK