Hi Ken and all,
I want to reiterate that the gender free dances I’ve attended and called aren’t interested in shaming folks for their experience in or preference for gendered dance roles, but we do want to maintain a space that doesn’t gender dance roles either explicitly or implicitly.
During the early days of mainstreaming this practice, my dance community struggled with this. Part of our process of switching to non-gendered bird terms was to have folks asking “which one’s the man?” and similar questions. Those in-transition dances often succeeded in having non-gendered role terms, but the dance roles were still largely gender-normed and featured a lot of mixed gender couples in the roles associated with their previously gendered role names.
Now that my communities have made the transition, my experience is a lot like what Kat K describes — the vibe is different and everyone really can and does dance with everyone. It’s joyful and fun.
My home dance in Santa Cruz, CA, usually has more people and more young attendees than it did before the pandemic (when it was still in transition between gendered and non-gendered practices). And I still dance with plenty of men as partners and neighbors, but they might be on the right or left. The openness to wider possibilities is exciting and fun.
Hope that helps.
Katherine Kitching wrote:
> Hi Ken!
>
> Changing the subject line as others suggested.
>
> I would say there is a difference between telling someone "quietly" and telling
> someone "furtively" :)
>
> We do the former and not the latter!
>
>
Thanks for the additional information, Kat.
I'll have to gain more experience in non-gendered contra; COVID has hampered that, significantly.
Ken Panton
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