4 Jan
2013
4 Jan
'13
5:22 p.m.
On 1/4/2013 7:49 AM, Aahz Maruch wrote:
On Thu, Jan 03, 2013, Kalia Kliban wrote:
Ah, I thought you were saying "Alan doesn't speak for me" while I now
think you're saying "Alan doesn't
have the right to speak for the entire community." So I will clarify
that across a fairly broad swath of
Bay Area callers, dance organizers, and volunteers in the late 1980s,
"hot-dogging" and "hot-doggers"
were fairly standard terms, and they referred to people who did
flourishes to the possible detriment of
the overall dance - showy swing dance balances that intruded into other
dancers spaces, men cranking women
around in twirls, swinging extra-long and being late for the next
figure, grabbing neighbors nonconsensually
for a swing in the middle of the hey, not taking hands along long lines
and instead one partner drops the other partner to the floor and picks
(her, usually) up, a guy who used to literally pick women up and put them on
his shoulder for lines of four down the hall. "We" (Bay area dance
organizers, callers, and volunteers I talked to
in the late 1980s) called it hot-dogging and considered it a problem.
Things not considered a problem: Cheat swings, general playfulness,
sticking out your tongue during a gypsy, etc, etc.
Over the years the flourish baseline has adjusted, we don't hear a lot
about hot-dogging, and so on. But *I* internally still feel that no
other dancer should do anything to me without at least my implied
consent that
keeps me from following the callers directions, no other dancer should
rob me of agency (and the stupid "make an arch instead of R&L thru"
thing is asymmetrical, keeps me from following the directions, and
doesn't give me
a way to decline), everybody should release their neighbors or partners
in time to dance with me on time, and
should dance in a way that shows awareness and at least minimal
consideration of the people around them.
If you disagree with that, let's discuss it. But I haven't seen you
dance in a way that looks like you disagree with it.
-- Alan
On 1/3/2013 8:21 AM, Aahz Maruch wrote:
My point/snark was that using "we" as Alan
did implies a kind of
agreement that I think is vastly overgeneralizing here. As I wrote in
the part of my post you elided, this has long been a source of tension
across multiple dance communities, I'd bet it probably goes back hundreds
or thousands of years.
Your point about people disrupting the dance with flourishes is
appropriate, but I don't think that making grandiose statements about
community attitudes toward flourishes helps any. On Thu, Jan 03, 2013, Alan Winston wrote:
I'm one of them. It's possible to flourish
responsibly, but that is
often not the case. [...] I don't think you need this for the argument;
there were flourishes
when I started contra dancing in 1985 (but we called the people who
did them "hot-doggers" and complained about them).
Which "we"
are you talking about?