[Callers] Contra / MWSD parallels?

Don Coffey is a Kentucky musician and dance caller who started dancing some 40 years ago. He recently published in The American Dance Circle, the quarterly magazine of the Lloyd Shaw Foundation, an article and a chart that attempts to organize and show the relationships between different forms of folk dancing traditions in America. Don made some thoughtful comments on trends he notices in the contemporary contra movement; he sees some disturbing parallels with what happened in modern western square dance. With his permission, I'm including those comments here as food for thought. Many on this list are newer to dance calling and I thought it might stimulate some discussion and, perhaps, might alert newer callers to some trends they might want to consider. David Millstone Lebanon, NH ---quoted material follows: * Modern contra dancing has become a mass "movement" with the energy of a greight train, but most of the young people who so love contras?and contras only-- have no idea it is but one component of a larger, very wonderful, tradition. This horse-blinder focus rather reminds me of... * ...an earlier movement, western square dance "clubs," which roared to prominence from the 1950s through 80s and attracted thousands. It has declined drastically as club populations aged, young dancers were not attracted "in," and clubby "dance lessons" became ever more costly and complex. * Similar to the way the western club movement strove to standardize individual square dance figures so that every square dancer nationwide would dance them "uniformly, the same way" (as if in lock step, one might say), I perceive comparable urges at work in the contras-only movement. One night some out-of-town visitors to our Friday night dance, long accustomed to automatically lining up in improper formation, had repeated difficulty adapting to our simple, ordinary, Ralph Page contras. * At least two of my caller friends, both very popular and widely traveled, have received open criticism when they tried to introduce a really-fun square or English dance to a contra dance crowd. Makes me wonder how a rowdy foot-stompin' Appalachian running set would have been received. * And then there are the two whole separate worlds of "international" folk dancing and "AngloAmerican" folk dancing ... and why don't their two large populations even know each other? It's as if they were on different planets. Let's say it again: All these dances are fun! They are living history that we, who love them, are responsible to care for, to preserve by dancing them, AND TO PASS ON TO THE NEXT GENERATION. [underlined in the original, but I used caps here for this text e-mail.] ---end quoted material (from The American Dance Circle, March, 2012)