The other possibility is to give up your hang ups about gender-identified names, and redefine them for your own purposes. It then breaks down to a simple question, "Do you want to dance girl or boy?" (from my MWSD group) or " I dance girl, would you like to dance?". On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 5:20 PM, Joyce Miller <joyceling(a)sbcglobal.net>wrote;wrote:

It would be interesting to know why some of these younger folks view it as a lead/follow dance.   Is it the flourishes/dips that do indeed have a lead/follow aspect to the dance, becoming the focal point of why they dance?  Or is it something else?  Contra by its very nature is a community dance, and while it does have some couple aspects, I find it difficult to see where it could bring someone to view it as lead/follow.  In an evening of dance, both men and women usually have their opportunities to "lead" a move.  Even the swing is an equal move - both dancers move around a common point and are both expected to carry their own weight, whereas in a couples dance the lead does indeed guide the follow on where to go.  Perry ________________________________ From: Jeff Kaufman <jeff(a)alum.swarthmore.edu> To: Caller's discussion list <callers(a)sharedweight.net> Sent: Wednesday, January 2, 2013 10:38 AM Subject: Re: [Callers] Alternate Role Terms On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 5:52 PM, Chrissy Fowler <ktaadn_me(a)hotmail.com> wrote: To some dancers the lead/follow aspect of contra dance is central while to others it's a minor component or an unwelcome intrusion. Viewing it as lead/follow is more common among younger dancers, more frequent dancers, and varies by dance series (in MA it's common at the Scout House and Greenfield, rare at Medway and Northboro.) Jeff _______________________________________________ Callers mailing list Callers(a)sharedweight.net http://www.sharedweight.net/mailman/listinfo/callers

Maia, I think you have to see contra from the point of view of someone who is not so talented and versatile as yourself. What attracts them to contra is that the caller leads the dance, and if they do what they're told, they can be successful at the dance, so they can relax and enjoy the social interaction without pressure to be responsible for someone else's good time. If at the end of each swing, both individuals are aiming to end in their respective places, and during courtesy turns, the left hand person backs up and the right hand person moves forward, etc., the dance will happen without any special expertise needed. Put they way, you can see contra as it is at its foundation: a truly egalitarian dance. To lay terms on the roles which imply a demand that one direct or accept direction from another dancer would do wrong to people who understand contra this way. If we are going to step away from tradition, I think we should at least respect the fundamental nature of the dance for the sake of those who don't layer on flourishes or take on particular persona to dance each role. It does no harm to those who choose to think of themselves as gallants and passives for the roles to be named something neutral, and perhaps we will encourage more new flourishes stemming from the right hand person if we don't teach them to think of themselves as passive. Just a thought, from someone who enjoys both roles, twirler and twirlee, no matter where she is standing. Andrea Sent from my iPad On Jan 2, 2013, at 12:07 PM, Maia McCormick <maia.mcc(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Jan 2, 2013 at 12:42 PM, Perry Shafran <pshaf(a)yahoo.com> wrote: When I'm dancing the gent's role I do several things that I think of as leading: - twirling on courtesy turns - when to end the swing - variations at other points in the dance - substitutions during the swing The last is the big one, but I have the most fun with finding other parts of the dance where I can swap something for something else. All of these are proposals; my partner decides whether to accept them. I'm constantly trying to predict what my partner would enjoy and lead that. When I'm dancing the lady's role (which I do a bit less than half the time) I like it when my partner takes this approach to the gent's role. I also have fun when dancing as the lady with gents that don't see the role as leading, but other things being equal I enjoy following more.

On 1/2/2013 10:07 AM, Louise Siddons wrote: Didn't you just make an argument that the roles are different, rather than that they are inherently lead/follow figures? (For example, the Scots (and Fried Herman, following them) call the twiddle at the end of rights and lefts a "polite turn". Is that a led figure by definition? (It's usually done with same-sex neighbor.) Similarly, "hoho, you didn't expect that, did you!" accompanies dances with same-sex swings, men gypsying, etc. And on a similar front, English dancing has ladies chains, both open and with courtesy turns. Would you argue that English dance is inherently lead/follow? Maybe I'm just bossy, but I want to take responsbility for the whole dance working even if I'm dancing the woman's role. (And I know I can't trust all the neighbor men to leave me pointing the right way if I don't take responsibility for myself.) 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). The flourishers are conspicous and they got copied. Your argument can pick up from there.

On 1/3/2013 6:22 AM, Louise Siddons wrote: I'll have to grant you the courtesy turn (indeed, I sometimes teach that as the gent sweeping the lady around). although I have a heck of a time getting a satisfying courtesy turn out of a partner who doesn't get it - and, really, it's fairly complicated to get how to share weight when you're in that position. I have a harder time than that leading the open ladies' chain in Elizabeth in the kind of seemingly-intuitive light physical guidance way I lead waltzing, partly because the ladies are off turning each other half the time. (In that figure, a lot of ladies-role-dancers don't really want to take six foot falls to turn the other lady and do more of a three-count pull by and then they're way early. I feel like if I were leading that figure more of them would be on time rather than early. Not a monotonic decrease - which may not be what you're saying anyway. I think non-led social dances or variations of them have been happening for a long time, from Charleston circles and Shim-Sham through the Twist (a not-very-led partner dance) and country-western line dancing, right in parallel with highly-led foxtrot, swing, jive, hustle, etc, through to swing revival and salsa craze. Can't speak for anybody else, but for me the idea that country dancing is essentially a lead/follow activity and that the roles should be called lead and follow (which doesn't necessarily follow on) is distressing because I was able to start country dancing (with Regency dance, 35 years ago) readily and fairly unthreateningly because all I had to do was my part and I only had to get myself to where I was supposed to be; I was doing an adequate job of executing choreography on the first night. Contrariwise, it took me 3 years to waltz adequately, and a big part of that was anxiety from being supposed to be in charge, to be "leading", when I didn't know what I was doing. If I'd had the same kind of extra anxiety-producing responsibility in country dancing I might never have started. I don't want to bar the door to other people like me. And I do genuinely think the lead in country dancing is very widely distributed, and that country dancing will work far better if everybody takes responsibility for their own geography. I'm not making a claim for democracy/egalitarianism, which is hardly supported by the voluntary authoritarianism of everybody being supposed to do what the caller says because the dance will work better. I don't know about anybody else. As to the racial segregation of the community - I'm going to assume you mean "of the community", that is, that contra dancing is very largely an activity of white (and Asian, and sometimes South Asian around here) people - it bugs me a bit but I don't know what to do about it. I'm kinda hoping that the white middle-class youth who've grown up with somewhat less de-facto segregation and actually have multi-racial social networks (they do, right? that's not just a Berkeley thing?) will bring their friends if we can get them to keep coming themselves. (I'm thinking "in the community" would mean that we had separate but equal contra dances for different races, and and what it seems to be mostly is that we have contra dancers nominally open to all comers but practically speaking only one segment of the population is represented.) Have you read Danny Walkowitz's book _City Folk_? Discussing English country dance in America in the 20th century he points out that ECD was initially done in the US by white people, and it still is, but that the definition of white people has expanded from the starting time to include people of Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Asian descent. -- Alan

To speak a bit more to the question of whether terms (gender-neutral or not) should make reference to "leader" and "follower," and whether this is a dynamic that a) does and b) should exist in contradance-- The lead/follow dynamic exists different amounts for various people, and can change depending on night, partner, set, etc. It is rather fluid--most good follows lead sometimes as well, for instance, to guide their lead into an allemande or something. This is also, as far as I know, the case with other dance forms as well. I don't have an awful lot of experience, but I know that in waltz, for instance, if the gent is about to run into someone, the lady gives a little extra pressure to redirect him and avert the crash. So yes, to a large extent, contra is certainly an equal-opportunity dance. But so are most partner dances. The amount of equality, the fact that sometimes the follow performs a lead-like function, the fact that one may back-lead (and easily!) does not diminish the existence of a lead/follow dynamic in certain parts of the dance, if executed by two capable dancers. So, I argue that the lead/follow dynamic is an intrinsic part of (the modern incarnation of) contradance. *It may be more or less important to certain people*, but I don't see that as a reason to try quite so hard to stamp it out altogether. In large part, this is because it *makes* the dance for so many people, myself included, and that things get mighty complicated with two people trying to lead at once--too many cooks, as it were. I would be inclined not to erase that distinction, but rather to emphasize the fluidity, the same way many dances do with gender roles. Obviously, as far as gender roles go, that's not a perfect system and still drags along loads of baggage, but I think it's a more appropriate solution where lead/follow is concerned. To emphasize that both partners are responsible for making the dance run smoothly, that being a follower does NOT by ANY means require surrendering of autonomy, that "lead" is more or less an optional role and does not need to bear sole responsibility for the success of the dance... That seems to me to be the way to go. Because then it preserves those roles for those who wish to participate, but not bindingly. (Of course, maybe people think that the very use of the terms is binding enough, no matter how much the caller says otherwise--and I suppose that IS the case with "gents"/"ladies" to a certain extent, so I don't know...) Moreover, I feel like it encourages an environment of discussion, and of finding out a partner's preferences--much like I think "do you like being flourished" should be a question asked by every single flashy lead to every single partner. Maia On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 5:48 PM, Alan Winston <winston(a)slac.stanford.edu>wrote;wrote:

On Thu, Jan 03, 2013, Alan Winston wrote: Which "we" are you talking about? I started contra two years after you, but that was with the background of "college-style" square dancing (i.e. square dancing with lots of energy and flourishes). I think there's always been some tension between people who want flourishes and people who want something a bit more sedate; even now, I call myself a "contra cut-up" to warn people. -- Hugs and backrubs -- I break Rule 6 http://rule6.info/ I don't really mind a person having the last whine, but I do mind someone else having the last self-righteous whine.

On 1/3/2013 12:32 PM, Kalia Kliban wrote: In fairness to at least one hot-dogger, there was a guy in the same role as me for one of the second-half contras, one couple ahead - a guy who has always struck me as the essence of smug hot-doggery, incidentally. This had a ladies chain and face new neighbor progression. This person - who I did seeing doing dips (always supporting the head) and lifts - was very carefully managing all the neighbor ladies through this progression, placing them - if they seemed confused enough to need to be placed, and many were - in the right place, facing the right direction, at the right time. I'd been bracing myself for a whole dance's worth of having to catch dizzy women for the swing, and instead, specifically because of this guys' being responsible about it, all the transitions worked. Hear, hear! I'm probably not, but I won't do it more in this reply. -- Alan

On 1/4/2013 7:49 AM, Aahz Maruch 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

I (bearded, etc.) certainly go into ballroom position rather than a symmetrical position when I'm dancing the lady's part, even when a male partner is aiming for symmetrical position (if he's not too insistent about it). And I tend to resist the violent dancing some men think they get to do when they partner with a man--partly because I generally don't like it, but also because I don't want to be danced with differently because I'm a guy. --Read Weaver Jamaica Plain, MA http://lcfd.org On Jan 4, 2013, at 5:56 PM, Maia McCormick wrote:

On Fri, Jan 04, 2013, Alan Winston wrote: Okay, it was not at all clear from your original post that you were talking about a subset of flourishes, specifically ones disrupting the dance. Overall I agree; I try to maintain awareness of other dancers around me and avoid flourishes that will affect anyone who either doesn't want or isn't prepared to deal with them. However, I'm indeed guilty of the arch on R&L thru. ;-) I like it because it permits the more balanced twirling of a California twirl (I think it's easier for the man to twirl with a California twirl than the standard courtesy turn because of the forward movement). -- Hugs and backrubs -- I break Rule 6 http://rule6.info/ <*> <*> <*> Help a hearing-impaired person: http://rule6.info/hearing.html

[overquoting because I'm not sure where to snip] On Wed, Jan 02, 2013, Maia McCormick wrote: Someone made the point that the common-English meaning for lead/follow is rather different from the social dance meaning. However, I think the common-English meaning still does not contain the fluid nature of contra leading and following -- so I resist the idea that we should try to reclaim "lead/follow" for our purposes. When I'm dancing (as a man) with other contra cut-ups, they'll often lead me into flourishes, so it trades off constantly. Some will be "natural" (such as twirling me when I'm on the outside of lines up/down the hall), some are more awkward (such as flipping me around when I'm "leading" the swing). It's all fun for me, and the surprise factor of not knowing what/when I'm going to get it adds to the spice. Then there are the weird ones, such as the person who likes rubbing zir hands on my buzzcut hair, so when we're interacting (as partner, neighbor, shadow, or whatever), we'll adjust the move and body position so that zie has one hand free to do that. From my perspective, it's somewhat like zie is leading, but it really wouldn't work unless we both [implicitly] agreed ahead what we're doing. Because of all this, I think I feel a bit less of what Maia does about different roles/persona when swapping gender, but because contra cut-ups generally comprise less than a third of a line, I do somewhat perceive what Maia does when I'm swapped. -- Hugs and backrubs -- I break Rule 6 http://rule6.info/ <*> <*> <*> Help a hearing-impaired person: http://rule6.info/hearing.html