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@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/1FAIpQLSfpgbzYSntTZlAgkNvfI8uhISstHGqhPpVPWRUWnx32V1GIcw/viewform — 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