Chet Gray wrote:
<<In regards to the present variety in role terminology, I may be fairly alone in this opinion, but I hope we never intentionally arrive at a grand consensus.
I love that different terms for roles have sprung up in different communities, just as I love that so many wonderful terms have sprung up for eye-turn/shoulder-turn/spiral. I love hearing "allemande", "hand turn", and "hand 'round" in different communities.
I love that "dosado" means drastically different things in different long-lived community ("square") dances. I love that some communities default to hands-across stars while others default to wrist-hold stars. I love that there are at least three different
promenade positions, and each is default in different communities. As much as my engineer brain would enjoy it, I hope we never have a CALLERLAB to strictly define terminology and steps for contra dances.>>
Amen!
One of the things I’ve long lamented about the modern square dance movement is the disappearance of regional variations. If square dancing is viewed as a hobby, it makes sense
(given the mobility of people in industrialized countries) to standardize the meaning of calls, hand and arm positions, and other rules and customs. But if it’s viewed as a folk art, it’s a crying shame to lose the variations. To me, standardizing a folk dance
form is like saying there’s only one right way to cook chicken. (Given how far MSD has strayed away from tradition and toward homogenization, it feels to me as if they’re saying KFC is the only right way to cook chicken.)
The contra dance world has never had an entity like Callerlab with the clout to convince local groups to standardize, and I don’t think it needs one. Two of the big attractions
of contra dancing (IMO) are its lack of regimentation and the small number of terms a newcomer must learn. That small number (again IMO) means that adjusting from one village to another is not difficult: Typically only 3 or 4 terms out of 15 or 20 are understood
differently.
A big question in my mind is whether there’s anything approaching a consensus among contra callers (and interested organizers and dancers) on any points beyond the obvious:
that dancing should be enjoyable and a dance venue should be a safe space. I would strongly caution folks against thinking there’s a consensus when only a small percentage of callers and leaders has been heard from. I’m thinking here, not specifically about
the gender-free vs. gendered issue or which gender-free terms to adopt, but about the big picture – which includes those issues, but also includes standardization vs. local styles, “gypsy” vs. a new term (and again, which one to adopt), and which, if any,
of the many new movements to expect dancers to memorize. This last issue is much on my mind, as the contra vocabulary has more than tripled since I started dancing. Do we really want to go down that road?
Getting back to the issue of gender-free terms (though I’ve changed the subject line to allow more general discussion), I hope that here, as elsewhere, we can feel free to
experiment and not feel constrained by what other people and groups are doing.
Tony Parkes
Billerica, Mass.
New book: Square Dance Calling (ready Summer 2017)