23 Mar
2013
23 Mar
'13
9:52 a.m.
[returning to an old thread and therefore overquoting]
On Tue, Jan 22, 2013, Alan Winston wrote:
Okay, so it really has been around a long time. ;-)
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On 1/21/2013 6:27 PM, Aahz Maruch quoted me:
Hrm, this (particularly the first sentence) seems to contradict what you
say below about mature dancers. Or do you mean to apply "enjoyment
maximizing" only to the choice to come contra dancing as opposed to the
behavior at the dance?
Alan Winston:
Everyone who comes to a contra dance is trying to engage in
enjoyment-maximizing behavior. There are usually plenty of other
things they could be doing with their Saturday night, and this thing
is what they decided would be most fun. So beyond the very basic
rules - you kinda have to do the figures the caller called, and do
them with whoever you come to in line; that's the basic contract -
anything else is optional.
Even if you did only want to dance with your friends, that is your
perfect right. You have complete freedom to decline any offer you
don't want to accept for whatever reason and then accept an offer you
do want to accept. You are not required to offer an explanation.
(If you say no to Joe and then yes to Jerry and Joe's paying
attention, he'll get the message that you didn't want to dance with
him and his feelings may be hurt, but that's actually his business,
not yours. It would possibly be a kindness to Joe and to the
community to tell Joe "you twirl me too much" or "I don't like to do
dips" if there's some simple way he could alter his behavior that
would let you enjoy dancing with him, but it's not required, and just
saying "No, thank you" means you don't have to have a conversation and
can each try to find other partners. If you only ever dance with a
small subset of the people in the hall, other people will eventually
notice and have opinions - and that's still their business, not
yours.)
Not that I'm necessarily disagreeing with this, but how do you reconcile
what you're writing here with the meme that people "should" dance with
the newbies and the sidelined dancers? I personally don't want anybody dancing with the
newbies who is
doing it solely out of a sense of duty, rather than because they
hope to enjoy it or because they're taking a big-picture view and
realize that the activity needs to integrate the newbies in order to
survive so that they can keep enjoying it.
Fair enough.
Erik Hoffman has a thing about the stages of a contra
dancer, and
the mature contra dancer - in his view - has passed through the
crazy flourishes and hottest partner phase already and is now
concerned with the happiness of the room; can enjoy helping a
beginner through a dance as much as being in a hot set with a hot
partner, etc. I like to think that will happen, although I look
around the Bay Area and see several people who, it seems to me, are
not mature dancers even though they've been doing it for twenty
years; guys and gals who book every dance, often while in line for
the previous dance, do dips; appear - and of course I'm not in
their heads so who knows what's actually going on - to only partner
with others they'd like to date, etc, etc. And while that annoys
me, it _is_ their perfect right. They paid their ten bucks; they
can try to have the kind of dance experience they want to have.
We're not going to toss them out for being uncommunitarian. And we
need their ten bucks. (Maybe not their individual ten bucks - we
can afford to bounce somebody for being creepy - but their
collective ten bucks; if we banned everybody who ever behaved
selfishly from contra dances we'd have a lot of trouble filling our
dance halls.)
Given that I disagree with Erik on a number of issues, I'm not taking his
word on what a "mature dancer" looks like. More precisely, I'm both a
"mature dancer" (because I try to stay aware of what of what keeps the
community together and take actions based on that awareness, such as
dancing gently with newcomers) and an "immature dancer" because I'm a
"contra cut-up" (as I usually phrase it) and therefore tend to reject any
kind of strict labeling.
Also, what
accounts for the prevalance of the meme that one "should
never" turn down an offer to dance? (I tend to fall into this camp and
I'm not really sure where I got it from.)
I was surprised recently to encounter the "If you decline an
invitation you must sit out that dance" meme in Jane Austen,
although I've forgotten where. I don't know if that's where it's
coming from, though.