4 Dec
2010
4 Dec
'10
4:13 a.m.
Here's a thought I've been toying with for a while:
A term we use in knitting to identify which way yarn twists is "N-wise or
Z-wise"
(think of a piece of yarn, look at the slanty lines the plies make, look at
the center slashes of an N, then a Z. See it?)
How many moves could be identified this way?
"Facing up and down, the first corners on the N diagonal, allemande once and
a half."
"Facing across, Z diagonals start a hey by the left"
"Facing across, N's diagonal chain"
As one who's life has been a little gender-role-freeish, I feel politically
entitled to come out and say I DON't like the band/bare thing, just because
the verbiage is less than euphonious to my ears. That said, I don't have any
better ideas .... yet. But I'm thinking, I'm thinking.
In many dances the roles of the "gent" and "lady" are NOT the same --
one is
a little more active, one is more reactive.
In any given pair of people, one PERson is often more active than the other.
It's the interplay of these two things (when do they match, support each
other? When do they work in opposition?) that make dances so unexpectedly
yummy.
There must be a way to acknowledge and embrace this -- if we get too neutral
we'll lose the story lines that make some of our best dances come to life.
Hmmm.
On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 3:29 PM, Martha Edwards <meedwards(a)westendweb.com>wrote;wrote:
As always, Alan, your wisdom astounds.
I'd probably like "bands and bares" if I (still) lived in Jamaica Plain,
which I did from about 1978 to, oh, 1985 or so, BUT...
But (she whined) I'm just not used to it, and it seems so...weird. Sigh.
But I've gotten used to weirder things, so maybe there's hope for this one
as well. I'll try to catch a JP dance or two next time I'm in Boston.
M
E
On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 1:17 AM, Alan Winston - SSRL Central Computing <
winston(a)slac.stanford.edu> wrote:
most
Martha wrote:
"street
If we callers can get used to "right
line" and "left line" being
backwards
> from the way we view it, that might work. I rather like the idea of
> architectural details being an indicator (in our hall it would be > side" and "naked lady side",
named for the lovely head/bust statues
which
adorn the
fireplace on the other side of the hall).
I've been calling gender-free English sporadically for about 10 years, recently in Jamaica Plain this September. Doing
this teaches you to
think
about the dances globally. There's all kinds
of not-that-old dance
instructions which say "first man turns second woman", which, first,
implies
active man and passive woman when we don't want to dance that way, and
second,
has a lot of syllables. "First corners turn right hand", and you've
directed
both to actively do something.
In English, there are a lot of dances where both members of a couple are
doing
the same thing, and you can nicely get through all the instructions with
"1s",
"2s", "1st corners", "2nd corners". For gender-free, I
usually try to
program
mostly dances where I can do that.
But there are some lovely dances where you can't do that, and nobody
seems
to
have much trouble with identifying lines by landmarks. In Jamaica Plain,
it's
the clock and the window.
So life is good on the gender-free English side. Nobody needs to wear a
marker, you belong to the couple you're lined up in, you're on the side
you
stood on this time - and the roles are very
similar, and nobody feels the
need
to swap during the dance, but if they did, it wouldn't be very confusing
because there's no expectation of a particular gender in a particular
side.
(And, indeed, even gendered English skews so much
more female that people
largely get over expecting plumbing that matches the role.)
I think things are different in modern contra choreography. Because so
many of
the dances are improper and the roles are typically different (although
men
can
get chained), it's often helpful to have some kind of signifier.
Line up for an improper contra. The 'nominal men' are in second corner
places,
the 'nominal women' are in first corner places. "Clocks" would be
first
woman
and second man, which is not so useful - typically if they're going to do
something, the windows are going to do it too, in modern contra dancing,
so
you
might as well say "neighbors balance and swing" and get on with it.
Heather and Rose english/scottish style would have you say "right file"
for
*that* line and "left file" for *that*
line, which sometimes degenerates
to
"righties" and "lefties".
Too many syllables, requires knowing right
from
left, requires remembering which line you were in
when the dance started,
etc.
So I don't think that the geographical suggestion is any help for contra,
and I
don't think that the suggestion that people should just deal with whoever
they
come across and not fuss about what sex they're supposed to be (which I
heartily endorse!) is actually any help with solving the problem that
"bands"
and "bares" solves. The idea is to have a clear way to assign a role,
which
role doesn't have a sex-linked component, so people know where they
should
be
standing in an improper contra, and so they know who the caller is
talking
to.
This also gives the caller _some_ chance of being able to see if the
right
people are in the right places, which you
don't get without external
markers.
If you want to dance the band role one dance and the bare arm the next,
you
take off the armband. If you want to switch
roles with your partner in
the
middle of the dance, you can trade the band.
So *for gender-free contra dance*, bands and bares - put on by the dancer
themself, by conscious decision, for each dance - make lots of sense,
don't
enforce gender roles like a tie or a fedora or a
head-scarf, don't push
the
agenda down the throat as much as arbitrary
designations ("hippos and
butterflies"), and are overall a Good Thing that Really Works. Honest.
I've
seen it.
While I'm pontificating:
While I support the right of people to change roles in the middle of the
dance
at gendered contra if they want to, and think everybody ought to just
swing
whoever they get (if you're dancing a
woman's role at the moment you
ought
to
take the woman's position in the swing), I also think people who insist
on
doing that when it freaks out their neighbors are
valuing their own fun
more
highly than the comfort of other people there and are behaving in an
anti-communitarian way - which is their perfect right, but it's not an
unalloyed good.
And some of the people who are freaked out are freaked out because if
somebody
they're not expecting comes at them they think somebody (maybe them) are
in
the
wrong place and their anxiety level goes up. Not homophobia - just
hanging
onto the dance by their fingernails. That's
a good thing to be aware of
when
you're swapping sides in gendered contra land.
-- Alan
--
For the good are always the merry,
Save by an evil chance,
And the merry love the fiddle
And the merry love to dance. ~ William Butler Yeats
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