15 Mar
2023
15 Mar
'23
4:20 a.m.
I found it surprisingly non-eventful to attend a dance with gender-free
terms. To all the nibbling on the edge groups: try it and see what it's
actually like! The best way I can explain it is it's like when someone
changes their nickname, and you know the name they used to go by. It's not
mentally challenging at all; you keep thinking the wrong thing, but you
think of the right thing quickly, and everything kinda just keeps going. It
doesn't even feel completely "non-gendered" to me, for what it's worth,
because the normal contra terms already feel kinda antiquated and arbitrary
to me. Using different arbitrary names is just a different sound to get
used to.
That's for the dancers. For callers, I'm sure it is very weird to use
different terms. Callers have to say the new terms, while dancers just have
to recognize them.
Atlanta also gets a lot of first-time dancers that do not return. I wish I
had my fingers on the numbers, because I know people used to collect
them, especially pre-covid. I'd guess around 10% to 25% of dancers are
first-timers, just as a wild guess. Most of them don't come back a second
time.
The mentally demanding aspect is real for new dancers. When I've brought
people and asked them how it went, they describe a real firehose of
commands and information coming in, and people grabbing at you from every
direction. If you look at their faces in the line, they're often really
tense and jumpy as they try to hyper-react to a situation that for them is
going at break-neck speed. I remember feeling like this at a few first
dances. It gets hard to remember this experience over time, because to an
experienced dancer a lot of things just click and do not need to be
processed any more. It's hard to remember that that's not true for new
people. You look at their faces and they look like normal people, i.e.
contra dancers. But inside, they're divergent from you, and some of your
words are gobbledygook to them.
In general, dance events have a lot of competition in most locales.
Non-gendered is usually the expectation nowadays, in my modest travels, so
it will cut out a lot of potential visitors to have an overly gendered
event. Bear in mind it's not just terminology that makes an event awkward
for gender diversity. Contra dance has an extra challenge for gender
diversity due to the format of the dance. Unlike at a couples dance, a
contra dance has you encountering each person in the line. So if you role
swap for a dance, you have to not just find a compatible partner, but
you're going to surprise everyone in your line. It can be emotionally
draining to do that. I wonder if there are contra dance sequences that make
a role-swapped dancer stand out less, e.g. no swings with neighbors, and
equal encounters with larks and robins in the other couple. "Coming up
next, everyone, it's a twister!" I wonder if those sequences are still fun
for people who WANT a cis-het binary dance, and that's what they came for.
For organizers.... no, I am not sure either how much to push it. Getting
back to the subject of repeat visitors, perhaps the biggest difference of
all is a caller who brings the fun and the inclusiveness, the type who can
laugh with you when something goes goofy. Micro-managing a caller's
terminology will not go well.
Good luck on the quest. However it goes, I'm tremendously grateful to
everyone organizing contra dances, and to all the people trying to make
their dance a little bit better each week.
Lex Spoon