CONTRA AND CONTRADICTION:
Gender and Agency within a Social Dance Community
Shaina Kapeluck
Sociology/Anthropology Directed Research
Warren Wilson College, 2006
Abstract
This research explores the ways in which gender roles are shifting within the
extended contradance community in Asheville and around New England. Though at first
glance, the structure of contra dance (a couples’ dance) appears binary, current dancers are
re-interpreting its structure. Anyone, regardless of their gender identity, can dance the
‘gents’ or ‘ladies’ role, highlighting performative aspects of gender and opening the
discussion of power dynamics between dance partners. In my observations and interviews,
I found dancers to be striving towards a sense of their own agency over this binary
structure, in the ways it governs dress, movement, and nonverbal communication.
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Introduction
I have been a part of the contra dance community since my early teens,
attending local dances and working as a vendor at large-scale annual dance festivals around
New England. Growing up in rural upstate New York, where there was no cohesive ‘gay
community’, and where a boy could get in-school suspension for wearing a skirt, I was
always attracted to the attitudes towards gender that I encountered at the dances. Even
though they proved a striking contrast to conceptions of gender in other social spheres, I
never once looked askance at these aspects of the dance community. I took it for granted
until college, when I began to acquire vocabulary such as ‘essentialism’ and ‘binary gender
system’, and cast a critical eye on the gendering system I had come to accept.
Contra, as a dance form, engages participants in what, at first glance, appears to be
a clearly-delineated binary structure. A dancer is always dancing one of two roles, and
these two roles are gendered in their titles. (except in the case of ‘gender-role-free’ contras,
which I will discuss later.) Throughout this text, I shall refer to these roles as ‘ladies’ and
‘gents’ respectively, as the majority of callers do, to distinguish the roles from the gender
identities of my informants. The caller’s instructions are directed, for the most part, at
either one role or the other. Dancers interact with one another based on both the caller’s
instructions and the roles ascribed to the other dancers in the line. As restrictive as this may
sound, it is the ways in which the community approaches who can perform these roles, and
how, that makes the contra dance community unique, I feel, among ‘traditional’ folk dance
communities.
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What is Contra Dance?
It is difficult to describe an authoritative, linear history of contra dance. Though a
dance form referred to as ‘contra dance’ has been popular in New England since it was
colonized, at this point in its conception, contra is hardly about historical re-construction.
Knowledge of the dance’s history is not required in order to participate in this dance
community, nor is it frequently emphasized during the course of a given dance. The
opportunity to alter the dance steps to one’s own liking is part of what makes contra
popular today. Still, a bit of background, as well as a basic outline of the dance form as it
currently exists, will help to clarify my further descriptions of this community. The term
“contra-dance” is enmeshed in folk-etymology to the degree that there is no authoritative
answer to whether the ‘contra’ in it’s title is a mutation of ‘country dance’ or the French
word contre, meaning ‘facing’ or ‘opposite’. Either explanation would be apt, and has
evidence to support it, as contra dance has roots in English Country Dance, but also draws
from French influence, and dancers line up to face one another up and down the dance hall.
This format, described in New England as ‘longways –for as many as will’ is usually what
comes to mind when people think of ‘contra dance’ today. “Between 1650 and 1728 this
form gradually superceded all others in popularity so that the term country dance came to
be primarily, often exclusively, the longways type.” (Holden, 3) Contra became
fashionable among English and French high society despite, and because of, it’s peasant
agricultural roots. Its favor among multiple social strata was a factor in its staying power
once contra crossed the Atlantic.
Contra suffered a fallow period in the United States which is not well-documented.
It never quite went away in parts of New England, but American ‘folk revivals’ before the
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1960’s didn’t rekindle widespread interest in the form. The information I could find about
contra in the 1930’s came from interviews with older dancers from that era, so perhaps a
lack of ethnographic research on social dance before the 1970 contributed to my
impression of said ‘fallow period’. In 1934, for instance, Ed Larkin, of Royalton, Vermont,
put together a group of ‘exhibition’ contra dancers, meant to demonstrate the sort of dances
he encountered in his youth at events such as the 1940 World’s Fair. (Nevell, 95) One
recently-composed contra dance, “For Those Who Cared” was “dedicated to the people
who kept dancing alive in the 1940s, when not many people were interested.” (Jennings,
110) Contra dance picked up more amplified attention around the early 70’s, when a new
demographic began showing an interest in the form, what one of my informants, David,
described as:
“back to the land’ population…and then there were a lot of hippies… We had a
few college kids. In the late 70’s there were actually quite a few college kids, around here,
around Amherst, where they have all the colleges. I think that contra dancing kind of
brought them all together very quickly.”
These ‘back to the land’ dancers could well have been drawn to contra dancing by
the same pastoral allure that the form once held for French and English ‘dancing masters’.
In any event, this new crowd made contra dancing popular and visible again, and, in turn,
attracted a,
“new generation that longed for the rural idyll [but] also liked rock and roll, and it
included fewer and fewer farmers, more computer programmers and engineers who
commuted to dances, drove hours to hear hot bands…wanted more challenging moves.”
(Collins, 2)
With each influx of new dancers, the scene expanded, and its expectations and
attitudes changed. One noteworthy shift was the breakaway of some GLBT contra dancers
to form the ‘gender free’, or ‘gender-role free’ contra community.
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A contemporary contra dance consists of those same ‘longways’ dances, usually
between two and five lines of pairs of dancers, with the band, and the caller, at one end. The
caller will repeat a sequence of moves by which these dancers will interact with their
partners and other dancers in the line, as couples ‘progress’ up or down the hall. Calls are to
the rhythm of the music provided by a dance band, in a patois which is familiar to seasoned
dancers but virtually meaningless elsewhere, a hybrid of pidgin French and English. I will
describe individual moves, such as ‘gents allemande’ or ‘ladies chain’ as needed
throughout this text. Every dance includes an opportunity to ‘swing your partner’ and,
usually, an opportunity to swing every dancer in the line who is dancing the opposite role,
so, by the end of the night, it is possible to have danced with every person in the room.
Previous Research
The relationship between dance and ethnographic research is always shifting. Early
influences include “…the European tradition of dance ethnology and folklore
studies…where the analyses of dance forms and traditions take precedence over the social
and cultural contexts of their performance.” (Thomas, 66) Feminist and post-structuralist
critiques of performance-oriented dance-forms such as modern dance and ballet are also
informative to this discourse. (Aalten, 42) Social dance is a more difficult topic to examine,
due in part to the challenges involved in analyzing non-verbal communication. The lack of
‘standardized notational system or language to represent dance’ does create space for
ethnographers such as David Walsh, Dick Hebdige, or myself to instead take on issues
within a dance community, issues of race, class, power and gender, as opposed to
examining these same issues concretely in terms choreography or use of space. David
Walsh discusses the construction of gay identity within the disco community, and Dick
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Hebdige’s descriptions of punk dance forms are incidental to his larger discussion of social
issues in Britain at the time. To a certain extent, I take up that invitation, and much of my
research focuses on aspects of the contra dance community that will stand still for their
portrait: issues of gender relating to dress, social dynamics between dancers as members of
the same community. Still, a portion of my research addresses directly the spaces
negotiated by dancers, and the shifting exchange of power as dictated by the caller and
interpreted by the dancers within their roles. In each case, I draw some of my inspiration
from theorists whose work discusses social arenas other than dance. At the same time, I am
attempting to examine the formal and informal choreographies of a social dance
community from a similar angle to the post-structuralist and feminist theorists, whose work
focuses on performed dance, such as Anna Aalten in her discussion of ballet. In my
research, I am implying that social dance is no less about performance, or different uses
and representations of bodies.
Contra dance attracts me as an enthnographer not only in its familiarity and
uniqueness, but also as an ideal site to test out some theoretical approaches that inspire me,
and see where their weaknesses may be. I do not presume to be ‘speaking for’ the members
of the dance community with whom I spoke, nor do I want to imply that I am stepping in
and improving matters in some way by means of my research. I can say, however, that the
issue of gender expression proved to be a fertile topic that sparked a great deal of interest
among contra dancers. I also feel that as limiting as a language which reinforces binary
systems (much like the one in which this paper is written) may be, research on the subject
of the nonverbal ways we subvert those expectations can help to change the way dancers,
and ethnographers, discuss and use gender.
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Methodology
As a longtime contra dancer, my access to the community was based on friendships
which consisted primarily of nonverbal interactions on the dance floor. Dancing with the
same people at various events over the course of my adolescence creates a sort of close
acquaintance relationship with whole roomfuls of people, one in which our brief
conversations seldom, if ever, strayed from the topic of dance. My informants were all
people I knew in this way, thus, arranging to meet and discuss the one thing I knew we held
in common was an invitation that none of my intended subjects rejected. The subject of
gender, however, which was always stated as secondary to discussion of dance, seemed to
be a more tender issue for dancers who have participated in the contra community over the
course of several decades. This may have to do with the fact that college-age dancers (as
two of my informants are) are more likely to be familiar with open discussions of gender.
Two interviews took place in dance halls before or after a dance, others at various locations
convenient for my subjects. My subjects include two college-aged dancers, Adam and
Hannah, who identify as male and female, respectively. My three other subjects have been
dancing longer, and have watched the community evolve to a greater extent. David is a
caller as well as a dancer, who identifies as male. I interviewed Nikki and her partner Kim
together in a focus-group format, as they have been attending dances together for nearly a
decade and have much to contribute to one another’s narratives. Both identify as female.
None of my informants elected to use a pseudonym, though they were presented with the
option in the IRB form.
My field observations took place at the Old Farmer’s Ball in Swannanoa, the Grey
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Eagle Monday night contra in Asheville, at the Ashokan New Year’s Contra in upstate
New York, and the weekly contras that occur in Greenfield, Massachusetts and
Peterborough, New Hampshire, respectively. Generally speaking, contra dances take place
in structures designed for other purposes: libraries, school gymnasiums, community
centers, and other public buildings. In that none of these spaces were constructed with
dance in mind, dancers alter the dance to suit their surroundings. The Old Farmer’s Ball
takes place in a gym on the Warren Wilson campus, and the Grey Eagle dance in a small
concert hall, with the dancers lining up sideways instead of facing the band, due to the
width of the stage. The Ashokan dances take place in a low-ceilinged, dimly-lit building
which serves as a cafeteria for a summer camp. The Greenfield dance is housed in the
Guiding Star Grange Hall, with a creaky wooden floor and similar lighting to the Ashokan
dance. This dim lighting tends to foster a sneaky, seductive dance style which is somewhat
inhibited by the setting of the “Town House’ where the Peterborough dances go on: a large,
clean, well-lit hall with high ceilings and white walls. My fieldnotes include, on occasion,
quotes from the callers instructing the roomful of dancers both before and during dancers.
Excerpts from these calls appear in my research as cited. I also include, from time to time,
observations accrued over my years of dancing before the year I began my research.
The primary challenge I encountered in my field observations is one to which
Andrew H. Ward attributes the lack of enthnography on social dance. When a dancer is
performing onstage, an observer is positioned to read easily whatever meanings they wish
to derive. In the case of contra dance, the room is full of dancers moving in relative
synchrony, performing for one another. The stage is the domain of the band, and the caller.
In order to get a sense of what dancers were doing, I observed each dance from multiple
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locations in the room, dancing one dance, and then observing the following dance from
various seats among the rows of folding chairs usually found flanking the perimeter of the
dance hall. When in the throes of a dance, I get a sense of what each dancer in the line is
doing as I progress up or down a line, but only the people in that given line. From outside
the rectangular mass of dancers, I only see the dancers along the borders of that mass. Early
on in my field observations, I attempted to remain passive, dancing only if asked and
taking notes the rest of the time. Soon enough I came to realize that as a member of the
community, I was ‘interfering’ more with my subjects by not behaving as I would if I were
there merely to dance. Even without asking others to dance with me, I found myself
dancing various roles with male or female partners. When I did initiate dances, I asked both
men and women to dance, and danced whatever role they seemed most comfortable with
my dancing. A contra dancer is in perpetual motion throughout the length of a given dance,
so my notes from within the mass of dancers are impressions recorded in retrospect
between individual dances.
The remainder of my data was inferred from what could be considered
‘institutional ethnography’. Many regular dances include, on their flyers or separate
booklets, suggestions for new dancers. These, as well as catalogues for dance weekends,
and advertisements for other regional contra events, are usually available at the door at a
given dance evening. Contra dancers, in the past decade, have also struck up a lively
dialogue online, and several articles wherein individuals describe their dance experiences
contribute to my research. Here I would also include texts written by callers for other
callers, which are cited, when used, as further examples of contra dancer representation.
During the course of my interviews, I continually encountered references to the
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‘gender free’ dance community, and offshoot of mainstream contra. Although this
sub-group intrigued me, I was unable to attend a gender-free dance, as they are generally
located in larger cities such as Boston and New York. The two communities share
members, especially because ‘gender-free’ contras do take place at large dance festivals.
For the sake of zeroing in on issues in which I had more direct field experience, I chose to
discuss gender first and foremost in terms of the mainstream dances. Nonetheless I will
refer to gender-free dances as they came up in my interviews and interweave with issues in
the larger dance community.
Research Focus
Many of the larger contra dances and dance events have tee-shirts for sale by the
door. Frequently these tee-shirts depict a couple dancing. Sometimes the couple consists of
anthropomorphized bears, or ants, or, in the case of the local Old Farmer’s ball, cows, but
this pair of dancers is always a male/female couple. The male dancer may be attired in
overalls or pants, or, if he is non-human, nothing, but the female is always in a swaying
dress or a skirt. However, if one visits one of these dances, say, the Dawn Dance in
Brattleboro, Vermont, or the Dance Flurry in Saratoga, New York, a sizable portion of the
couples on the floor exhibit some striking differences from this model. First, the skirt
wearer is just as likely to be male, and second, the pair of dancers may not be male/female
at all. These phenomena do not go unnoticed by the people who design these shirts, nor the
veteran contra dancers who frequently wear them to dances.
Within the walls of the gyms, grange halls and community centers that host contra
dances, during the elected times when the dances take place, dancers are allowed to operate
outside of the prescribed gender roles they occupy in other social spheres. This is one of the
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many contradictions I encountered in my exposure to contra dance. This community,
dancing together, presents itself to me as a scenario where many seemingly mutually
exclusive truths are expressed simultaneously. These sites of contradiction inspired me in
the formation of several fundamental research questions. How do male dancers who wear
skirts interpret this act, and how do others in the community interpret it? How do dancers
perform ‘ladies’ and ‘gents’ roles, in the knowledge that they have the option of
performing either? How do partners dancing these roles negotiate the power dynamics that
this dance structure helps create? How do dancers experience a sense of their own agency
while still following, as a group, the instructions of a caller? Finally, what lasting
influences might these trends have on contra as a community, and as a dance form?
Analysis
Male Dancers in Skirts
The prevalence of male dancers in skirts is a contradiction immediately visible
upon arrival to a non-contra-dancer. They are not advertised in contra dance flyers, or in
instruction booklets for new dancers, but, because of their visibility have become a sort of
unspoken mascot of the contemporary contradance community. In my interviews and field
observations, the skirt in this context seemed to play multiple simultaneous roles, ones
which weave together two distinct theoretical approaches. Semiotician Dick Hebdige sees
articles of clothing as playing various symbolic roles in a given social sphere, as a sort of
vocabulary of resistance. “By repositioning and recontextualizing commodities, by
subverting their conventional uses and inventing new ones, the subcultural stylist…opens
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up the world of objects to new and covertly oppositional readings. (Hebdige, 102) As a
gendered symbol, the male skirt-wearer contributes to both a carnivalesque atmosphere of
reversals within the dance space, and to dancers’ own construction of their image as a
permissive, ‘fringe-y’, or even ‘radical’ community, as I will discuss later. At the same
time, the skirt participates in the dance community with its own agency, as a technology
which allows for freedom of movement, changing the male dancer’s embodied experience.
Thus in this instance, a skirt could be considered what Bruno Latour would call a
“quasi-object,” which is not merely “a white screen on to which society projects its
cinema” (53) but as influential a member of this community as any if its dancing subjects.
This angle in turn helps to explain a new meaning for the skirt, as a status symbol which
can read, on male dancers, as both a signifier of technical skill and as an invitation for
further open gender play.
David, a dancer who has been part of the community since the 1960’s, spoke
carefully about his own appreciation of dancing in a skirt. He insists upon function over
form, thus avoiding the implication of the skirt’s semiotic, politically-weighted role,
emphasizing instead ease of movement:
“I can tell you for myself that the order of the level of comfort is, skirts are best,
shorts are next and pants are last. So I think that’s really important. A lot of guys have
discovered that dancing in skirts is infinitely more comfortable and those people, or many
of those people, are not making any kind of gender-related statement at all, they’re merely
dancing in what’s more comfortable.”
In claiming that ‘those people, or many of those people’ don’t don the skirt with it’s
gendered significance in mind, David may be attempting to ward off any potentially
politicized readings of an activity he enjoys, but he is also defending a different way of
viewing the body’s relationship to objects.
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Adam, a younger dancer and skirt-wearer, has a similar account, ‘It’s just way more
comfortable. It’s loose, it’s flowing, it’s kind of a feeling of freedom. Not constrictive.’
However, his appreciation of this freedom has spread from the freedom created by the
object to the object itself, and thus, when I asked him if he preferred to dance in skirt, he
responded immediately with, “Um, hmm, depends on the type of skirt. Currently my
favorite dancing accoutrement is my Utilikilt. Does that classify as a skirt?”
This garment in particular is rich with ambiguities. In asking me if the Utitilkilt
“qualifies as a skirt”, he opens up the discourse, further blurring the gender distinctions that
skirt-wearing can imply. Adam, putting on a facetious monotone ‘official’ voice, recited
for me that “The Utilikilt company identifies it as an MUG, not a skirt but a ‘male
unbifurcated garment’.” And then drops the act to add, “And that is one of the reasons that
the Utilikilt caught on with so many guys who would not wear skirts.” These particular
items became popular among contradancers male and female after they began appearing in
the vending section of the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival, a popular summer destination for
contra dancers. Skirt-shaped garments, they were marketed as male-gendered, with playful
connotations of machismo which also appealed to female dancers.
It is interesting to watch male dancers negotiate the new ways of moving on the
dance floor that skirts not only allow, but, to a certain extent, insist upon. When the caller
instructs all the ‘gents’ in a line to perform the same step, say, ‘move into the center and
form a wavy line,’ the men in skirts frequently spin into the center, while the non-skirted
men are most likely to walk into the center a more linear fashion. David, a caller from
Massachusetts, attributes ‘exuberant twirling’ popular now to the influx of younger
dancers who began attending New England dances in the 1970’s, thus, not ‘traditionally’
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ascribed to one gender over another. The dynamics of contra create more opportunities for
the person dancing the ‘ladies’ role to implement an ornamental spin, but when I observed
dances, both in Asheville and New England, I noticed that the people who went out of their
way to spin were the people with skirts billowing around their legs, regardless of their roles
as dancers, or gender identities. In my experiences dancing, I feel far more self-conscious
spinning in a pair of pants, and seldom wear them to dances. The skirt both illuminates and
obscures the bodily mechanics of executing a spin, which seems to invite male dancers,
even when dancing the ‘gents’ role, to seek out the experience.
There are plenty of skirts male dancers could wear which would not allow for the
freedom that comes attached to these dancers’ fondness for the garment. I have yet to see a
man dance in a narrow pencil skirt, which would be even more restrictive of movement
than the pants or shorts that David placed at the opposite end of the comfort spectrum. At
the same time, I frequently watched men struggle with the liabilities that surface when one
dances in a wraparound or miniskirt, which limit movement by grace of the same factors
that make them so comfortable to move in. Here, Adam enthuses on the variety of skirts he
prefers for different contra dancing occasions,
“…there are some skirts that are great to dance in, there are some skirts that I am
wary of dancing in. Generally I prefer, I have discovered, to dance in…well, it’s an
occasion thing. I like to do really intense dances in a beat-up broom skirt, so I don’t worry
about it, it’s a piece of clothing that is loose and comfortable, but an old broom skirt is one
that I can wear in the mud and the dirt and not worry about getting it dirty or something.
Um, I like to wear my silk skirts on Saturday dances, because they’re very nice, and at
Saturday dances you wanna look your best, out there, trying to flaunt your stuff, very much
a peacock king of thing. But I’m always wary of putting holes in them. I’ve danced in wrap
skirts before, I no longer will do it, they are too constricting. Also, I always feel like they’re
flying open.”
The freedoms created for the wearer by the skirt are only part of the equation. The
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silk skirt’s symbolic value at a Saturday dance outweighs the risk of damaging the material,
which cannot be said to allow for as wide a range of motion. As for wraparound skirts, or
miniskirts, which Adam does not decry here but which I do see male dancers sporting at the
dances, the threat that they will allow so much space between dancer and garment that they
will expose the dancer or embarrass his (or her) partner can do plenty to limit the way the
skirt-wearer moves. Too wide or fast a spin will cause a wraparound skirt to part and open,
or a miniskirt to fly up. A miniskirt wearer is also limited in the amount of bounce they can
put in their step, for similar reasons. Though I hear complaints from time to time about
what I’ve heard termed “Marylin Monroe moments” I still see male dancers wearing them
and, for the most part, amending their dancing styles accordingly.
How the skirt, on a male dancer, is read by other dancers also fluctuates. Here, Adam
recalls a particular trajectory,
“At first, I started to notice older guys in skirts, a lot of like, grizzled, salt-and-pepper
beard, dance veterans. And the skirt almost had a negative connotation to it, like “Oh, the
dance-Nazis in skirts.” They were very intense about dancing right and well, and got very
mad at you if you messed up, and assumed that, if you were young, that you were not a
good dancer. Then you start to see young guys, like university dancers, mostly early 20’s,
wearing skirts, and everybody was saying ‘the good dancers are the guys in skirts’ the
young guys in skirts, like, if you want a good dancer, go get a young guy in a skirt…I was
already wearing a skirt, I was unusual for my age group, wearing a skirt, and then other
guys my age started wearing skirts, and I think once skirt-wearing became more popular, it
kind of lost its significance.”
Among my informants who identify as female, the skirt as a garment received round
approval, so it’s role as a signifier is still, to some extent, intact. Adam’s complaint may
simply be that too many guys have skirts on for the skirt’s meaning to serve him well, i.e.,
get him more dance partners. Yet men in skirts, in their prevalence, also hold an important
significance for dancers: as a way to gauge, at a distance, how potentially tolerant a given
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dance community may be. Hannah, another younger dancer, measures the Cincinnati
dances she grew up attending, among other things, in terms of the amount of be-skirted
men in attendance:
“There may have been one or two. Definitely when I went to new year’s I brought a friend
with me and he dressed in a skirt and no one said anything other than, like ‘oh, that skirt
looks really great on you’ or ‘what a nice skirt’ so, I mean, it was totally okay, but he was,
like, close to the only one.”
Two issues are at stake here: not only how many men wear skirts to the dances but how
well the rest of the community (skirt-wearing or otherwise) regards these individuals, who
could be perceived as transgressors, or at least subversive, in other social spheres. So, even
if her friend is the only man in a skirt at the dance, these other dancers complimented both
his skirt and the wearing of said skirt. If the skirt in the context of a male-bodied dancer
makes this garment a status symbol for him as far as his skill and openness are concerned,
he himself becomes a similar status symbol in context of a given dance, or local dance
community. Dances that contain high populations of skirted dancers read, to a person
well-versed in the non-verbal language of contra, as a sign of the multiple freedoms to be
experienced therein. The freedom of movement these male dancers enjoy changes the feel
of a roomful of dancers moving in unison, and just as significantly, the freedom of gender
expression that permits skirt-wearing can open doors to permit further open gender play
within the framework of an evening of dancing.
Performance of Gendered Roles
Contra dancing is an unusually ideal site to examine the ways in which gender can
be seen as performative. Judith Butler describes gender as “a stylized repetition of acts,”
(Gender Trouble, 179) which could also be a description of any dance form. Contra dance,
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in particular, invites its participants to dance gender: to select a gendered role and perform
it for/with a series of partners up and down the line. In a way, that contra is a recreational
dance form rather than a dance performed on stage for an audience of non-participants,
allows room for some of the ambiguities of the performative model of gender to become
visible. While the structure of the dance form appears, on the surface, as binary, with two
distinct roles, dancers are free to subvert that structure by dancing within it.
At this point, even callers acknowledge the popularity of this approach to roles.
Steve Zakon-Anderson, calling in Peterborough, NH, included in one walk-through for
beginning dancers, the sentiment that, “Anyone can dance any role –men with men,
women with women, but it is a dance called with a gent’s part and a lady’s part. Feel free to
dance with whoever you want, but I recommend for your first few dances, you dance the
gender (he pauses)…you came in with! End a swing with the woman on the right. So,
again, 2 women dance, 2 men dance, you got to think about what role you’re playing. Line
up, down the hall.”
Kim sees this as a positive break from ‘tradition’: “When I started dancing, they
were dancing at that level of complexity, it was not like a basic New England traditional
form, at that point, it was not in any way related to a very traditional, ‘every step is
followed directly’, it had already evolved into something interpretive.” Her partner, Nikki,
adds, “Well, I think Kim is right when she said you have this basic structure, but within that
structure you can do anything, as long as you’re there on the beat, you know?” Butler’s
performative model of gender does not imply that we are free to perform any embodied
acts we wish in the name of gender, “…such self-fashioning does not imply free creation
by an individual, for gender is a performance crafted under a ‘situation of duress,” and in
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response to social and economic compulsion.” (Ferguson, 94) In this case, the ‘situation[s]
of duress’ are the prescribed roles and the caller’s instructions, which place limits on what
a ‘lady’ or ‘gent’ have room and time to do at a given point in a dance. Dancers’ ingenuity
with in their use and interpretation of these instructions, and callers’ ingenuity in response
to these acts help to illuminate the performative aspects of gender.
David Kaynor, whose first contra experiences occurred in the 1950’s, has been
dancing with same-gender partners as long as he’s been dancing. “When I was a preteen of
course I wasn’t into the whole boy-girl thing, in fact I was afraid of girls and only danced
with the boys… I think little kids have a certain amount of permission to do that, but you
get up into your teens and the whole landscape changes.” This shift in the “whole
landscape” of gender after the onset of adolescence may be much of the draw for dancers
who begin dancing in earnest in their teens, such as my two youngest informants.
Like children, female dancers have historically been allowed more leeway in their
selection of dance partners. Female dancers, when faced with a shortage of potential male
partners to dance the ‘gents’ role, make do with female ‘gents’. This phenomenon, when I
first began dancing, in the late 90’s, came to be expected of the dance community. David
remembers encountering it in 1973, when he first began sitting in with dance bands. “I took
my guitar and went to the dance and, this was back in the days when there were a lot more
women than men at the dances.” I asked him if women danced with one another at these
dances, to which he responded,
“Oh yeah! They had no hesitation. But they would come up to the front of the stage and
look at [the band] and say, ‘alright, which one of you guys will come down and dance?’
and you know, I would say, ‘Wow! I will!”
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Though female dancers once jokingly griped about the ‘gent’ shortage, along with influxes
of dancers young enough to slip under prescribed gender expectations, it may have
contributed to the climate of openness which is so prevalent today. As for the shortage of
men available to perform the ‘gent’ role, David attributed it to “…fear of failure. I think
guys have really fragile egos, and a lot of the real strutting and posturing that goes on with
males is an effort to deal with that.” David, an avid dancer, here discusses “guys” as a
category, generally, somehow separate from himself. Perhaps his status as a long-time
dancer has changed the meanings of the sources of some of these perceived anxieties for
him. Adam’s experience as a beginning dancer was perhaps a by-product of these fears, as
well as the dance community’s anxieties over the dramatic shortage of ‘gents’:
“…something I remember in particular is that they were greatly excited at a male dancer. I
was encouraged specifically based on the fact that I was male, to pursue dancing, at
length.”
Over the course of the year I began my field observations, I was surprised to
encounter, night after night, a relatively equal male/female dancer ratio. The fears that
David sees dissuading males from dancing must have lessened, or the connotations of
‘dancing’ changed. David Walsh, observing another social dance form, disco, recognized a
similar shift,
“..because the sheer physicality of the dancing itself creates an image of
masculinity which removes the sissyish implications of being able to dance and dancing
that inhibited men from joining in when it was the women who did all of the elaborate
display in the dance routine. Discotheque dancing, then, has lead to the remasculinzation of
dancing by helping to give the male a place of eminence in which he can engage in display
just as easily as women and without embarrassment as a result.” (Walsh, 114)
This ‘remasculinization of dance’ was something Adam encountered as he became
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a more active member of the dance community in his teens. He described the young male
dancers as being ‘more intense about dance’ and recalls that,
“Also, as I got older, there definitely was, like, a sort of alpha-male thing, being the
best dancer, who hopefully was like, going to dance with the cutest girl, kind of a
competition thing going on among the guys at this particular dance community.”
Now, with a greater male population attending contra dances, this isn’t the only
attitude that is changing. A surfeit of female dancers would have necessitated a
community-wide social sanctioning of female ‘gents.’ When given the option of an entire
hall full of male gents and female ladies, paired up, dancers have not changed their habits.
I still see more male/female couples than any other pairing, but female/female couples
remain a popular choice at every dance I attended. Nikki claims “I’ve noticed that younger
girls, specifically, will say to someone, you know, ‘well, I wanna dance with you,’ to
another woman, so it’s not just survival, it’s not just, you know, ‘oh there’s nobody else to
dance with so I’ll ask this woman’.” To be fair, a contra dancer identifying as a woman
takes less of a risk in dancing with a female partner, for several reasons. Like a
child-bodied dancer, a female-bodied dancer has less to lose by performing an act which
could be read as a gender transgression. The two occupy a similarly liminal social space.
Carol Anne Tyler’s critique of Butler’s discussion of performativity in Gender Trouble is
based on a similar distinction: “…that it will always be different for a woman to enter
transgressive gender norms than it will be for a man,” due to “very different positions of
power within society.” (Undoing Gender, 210) This being said, there are less male/male
couples on the dance floor. In the words of Nikki, “In general, the older they are, the less
likely they are. I think, broad generalization, older women are much more likely to switch
roles than older men.” Kim concurs, “Well, older women are also more socialized to dance
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with women their whole lives.”
According to Nikki, “[I]t’s still very slow for men to dance with men…Well, I
think that’s a more societal thing. There’s a real societal pressure on men, not to physically
contact other men.” A transgendered woman who has been dancing within the extended
community since before she transitioned, she extends the category of ‘other men’ to
include herself, giving an example of ‘someone [she’s] been dancing with a long, long
time”:
“I mean, um, there’s this guy who dances in Poughkeepsie, and older man, and sometimes
–I kinda judge a crowd, when I decide whether to dance the women’s part or not, because I
don’t wanna make people so uncomfortable that they don’t have a good time. So
sometimes if I think the crowd is a little less open to the idea, I’ll only dance the woman’s
part of there’s no neighbor swing, because I figure that’s kind of the most intimate part of
the whole thing, is the swing. Well, there’s this one older guy, I would dance the woman’s
part, and during the allemandes, he would just glare at me.”
She reflects that this is,
“funny, because, you know, men allemande men all the time, and so, I think it’s just
taking men a really long time to get over that, even in the contra community, where people
are more comfortable. And if you look at the people, the men who dance with men, in
general it’s younger men. You don’t see older men dancing with each other.
Kim: You do sometimes, but not as much.
Nikki: It’s the same thing with the skirt thing. In general, it’s younger men.”
The allemande that Nikki refers to is one of many moves that the caller will instruct
dancers to perform which involves two people performing the same role, ‘gents’ or
‘ladies,’ to, in effect, dance with one another. The allemande consists of two gents (or
ladies, as the case may be) approaching one another from opposite sides of the line, where
they stand beside their respective partners. They move into the center of the line and join
hands to face one another as they circle for a count of four. Over the course of my field
observations, I have witnessed gents using the allemande as an opportunity to, among other
things, arm-wrestle, embrace tightly and spin around, perform swing dance moves, or other
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activities which require more physical closeness than a traditional allemande. Allemande
tends to be directed at gents, but when the caller insists on a ‘ladies’ allemande’ I see these
activities less frequently, if at all. Occasionally two women will perform an
embrace-and-spin, during allemandes, or in place of a “ladies’ chain,” a move which is
always directed at that role. The spin will be faster-paced, as a ladies’ chain is more or less
an opportunity for ladies to switch places in the center of the line, taking hands briefly in
the center. Still, I have, when dancing the gents’ role, moved in to allemande my opposite
gent and saw his look of dismay as he moved in to embrace me and then stopped himself.
These sorts of modifications, for the most part, are taken on by male dancers. Kim’s
description of these interactions brings up, one again, the “re-masculinization of dance,”
observing that, “…they can actually give each other that energy, provide the means for
them to do all that athletic spinning and jumping.”
When two men, or two women, are dancing together, the act of performing a role
becomes more apparent. Often these circumstances lead to a sort of general gender
giddiness, as if dancing turns the volume up on gendered stereotypes. When dancing the
ladies’ role with other women, I watched many women straighten their spines, jut out their
chins and make showy, mock-chivalrous gestures at me, in the way they might take my
hand for a promenade or dip me at the end of a swing. Occasionally, men moving in to
allemande with me, instead of withdrawing their invitations to modify the move, have
modified it enthusiastically, swaggering up to arm-wrestle me, emitting pirate-like
‘arrgh’s, inviting me to meet them in their hyperbolic performed masculinity. When
dancing the gents’ role, I have seen men dancing the ladies’ role curtsey at me before I
swing them. When I asked Adam what he liked about dancing the ladies’ role, one of his
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reasons shows some parallels to these performances.
“The steps lead into a different way of presenting yourself, a different way of dancing, a
different kind of style to it, I suppose it’s one that is more stereotypically feminine,
flashy…I don’t know, it’s what’s emphasized is twirling, and being very showy with your
body. Cause I don’t get an opportunity to dance like that, when I’m dancing the male role.”
Sometimes the giddiness is so contagious that it infects male/female couples. For
instance, one night at the Old Farmers’ Ball, I found myself dancing near two grey-haired
men wearing long, flowing Indian-print skirts that look like they have gotten a lot of wear.
While their female partners were getting water, they began grabbing one anothers’
invisible breasts, one, and then the other, laughing, swaying their hips. When one of their
female partners came back she joined in, grabbing the air in front of her male partner’s
chest enthusiastically, also laughing. Another activity that ups the giddiness quotient is the
act of switching roles mid-dance. This is especially popular among younger dancers. Here,
Adam waxes rhapsodical about switching:
“Oh, switching is so much fun. It’s just great, because you get to dance both parts.
It’s just more dancing. Lots more different steps. And the chance to be spun and spin in
different ways, in different directions, and do more with your body, which is what dancing
is about, expressing your body, and doing things with it.”
Hannah also speaks of it fondly. “I really like it when men and women take it upon
themselves to rotate, I think that’s great.” Part of the popularity of switching may stem
from the chaos that ensues when everyone else in the line must re-learn who is dancing
which role. When the crowd at a given dances is relaxed, this results in a lot of giggling and
spoken acknowledgement of ambiguities such as the ones I encountered as the Petrborough
dance began. My female partner and I were facing a male/female couple. Tracy turned to
me. “You wanna be the boy, girl or something in between?” She looked at the girl facing us
and asked, “You the boy?” Her partner retaliated with a request. “Skirt count!” The only
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one in pants between the four of us is his female partner, who nonetheless dances the
female role.
All of these scenarios strike me as examples of what Judith Butler calls the
“giddiness of the performance,” which lies in “the recognition of a radical contingency in
the relation between sex and gender in the face of cultural configurations of causal unities
that are regularly assumed to be natural and necessary.” (Gender Trouble, 175) The
instances which Butler sees demonstrating this performative giddiness are the act of
donning full drag, and the act of taking on a ‘butch’ or ‘femme’ role within a lesbian
relationship. To describe the skirt as “drag” seems like reductionism, at best, but the roles
assumed by lesbians are similar, if less fleeting, than those assumed by contra dancers: the
act of assuming a gendered title and performing it, especially for only a given interval of
time. It is not merely the titles that gender the act of taking on the gents’ or ladies’ role, but
the power dynamic created for a pair of dancers by those roles, wherein the ‘gent’ is
leading. What I want to illuminate here is the way in which these roles create a sort of
simplified cartoon of a binary gender system, whose outlines can be lifted and moved
multiple times in one evening. Thus, they make visible the ways in which ‘men’ and
‘women’, like ‘gents’ and ‘ladies’ are both stylized and pliable.
Negotiating Power
The popularity of dancing both roles also has the power to expose long-unpoken
power-dynamics between partners, which many dancers feel could use some tweaking.
The experience of dancing the ‘other’ role shows ways that the stereotypically gendered
interactions can be reproduced so long as women keep dancing only ‘ladies’ and men
‘gents’. Hannah’s first dancing experiences illustrate a common gent/lady power dynamic.
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“I mean, I can tell you, when I first started going to contra dances I was, like, seven,
and I would go with my dad and his wife. Most of the time I would sort of go off in a corner
and read books, but sometimes old men would come up and ask me to dance. It was just
sort of like, well, of course I didn’t know what I was doing, but they’d just sort of twirl me
around a lot, and, I mean, there was definitely a sense of control, if you’re looking at
gender roles. I didn’t know what was going on in the dance, no one made an effort to teach
me what was going on in the dance, it was mostly like, we’re gonna pick you up and twirl
you around and put you where you need to be, move you on down the line. I mean, I
thought it was awesome, I thought it was really fun, but I didn’t get engaged in contra
dancing, but there was nothing to engage me, there was nothing to keep me coming back,
and I though I hated it until I came to Warren Wilson and, til I was like 18, and I got my
own interest going.”
Hannah here experienced ‘a sense of control’ but it wasn’t hers; she had little
agency as a dancer. There was ‘nothing to engage’ her as long as she was only exposed to
this particular dynamic, among the many that a contra community can offer. Hannah’s
experience of agency, which keeps her engaged in, yet frustrated with, the contemporary
dance community, has a lot to do with opportunities to improvise.
“…dancing the male role is really intimidating. While I can do it, I feel inferior because I
can’t do anything fancy, you know, within the role, cause that was not how I learned, and,
like, I can do the basic things, but that’s all I can do, but when I’m dancing female, the male
takes so much lead that I can do really cool stuff, feel like I’m doing really cool stuff
without necessarily having the knowledge behind it. So it, there’s a lot of freedom, sort of,
even though someone’s pushing you around, but I definitely like dancing the female role
better.”
Yet, at the same time, different kinds of improvisation give her greater or lesser feelings of
agency, depending on how reliant on her partner she must be to perform them:
“I think you can do some improv in terms of, like, when you’re dancing solely, like when
you’re not connected to another person you can do a lot of improv, but it’s the men who
initiate the turns, and if you’re swinging with someone, I feel like the man has a lot of
control in terms of where you go, which way he pushes you, like when you’re doing inside
turns, outside turns, that kind of stuff. And so, he has a lot of control over what
improvisation you’re doing.”
Improvisation in contra can consist of anything that the time constraints imposed
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by the band and the caller will allow. In the words of Kim, “Man, your hand has got to be
there on the downbeat.” In other words, don’t improvise until you lose the beat, because
everyone else in the line is counting on you. She and Nikki recall a particular dancer who
is, to her thinking, overly fond of improvising.
Nikki: You know in Chorus Jig when you have to go down the center with your partner?
He was leapfrogging with his partner!
Kim: Now, we had to get out of the way and stop, and wait until he was done.
Nikki: It was kinda cute the first time, but it upset the timing of the dance.
Kim: And then other people can’t enjoy the dance.
All contra improvisation works within a matrix of multiple, simultaneous power
dynamics. Improvisational ornaments performed ‘solely’, such as spins and leaps and
hand-claps, challenge the control that a caller has over their roomful of dancers to impose a
beat, maintain order. They also test the expectations and trust of every other dancer in the
line. Other two-person ornaments, such as swing dance moves, dips, arm-wrestles, or
novelty swings where each dancer hold their partner’s nose, are primarily an arena of
boundaries and trust between partners. Dancers walk a tenuous line in initiating them and
must be wary of their partner’s interest in joining them in the act. Often, signals are
misread, or one dancer assumes the power to decide for the other. The more frequently
dancers alternate roles, the more the dialogue on the powers invested in each role opens to
new perspectives. For instance, the sense of agency Hannah feels dancing the ladies’ role
reads differently for Kim. “I like to go back and forth, because, when I’m dancing the male
role, I can take a break, and let her work! And I get to flirt with the girls, which is fun.”
Nikki, frequently Kim’s dance partner in either role, sees the ways in which either role can
be empowering. “I think it’s a lot of fun to do the women’s role! It’s much more active. I
mean, you get to twirl, I mean, when I think about what men generally get to do, you know,
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the leader is generally the facilitator. Either they’re spinning you, or, you know, think
about how many times the leader is just standing, while the woman goes and does stuff, and
that’s why she says she gets a rest!”
Male dancers often find that dancing ‘ladies’ instead of ‘gents’ gives them a taste of
how important subtlety and communications can be to the ‘lady’, whoever they might be.
Here, Adam describes the way female ‘gents’ treat him when he dances the ‘ladies’ role.
“They’re a little, they feel more comfortable pushing me around. Twirling me harder than
they would twirl a girl. So, like, it’s like, ‘You’re dancing the woman’s part but I’m
treating you like you’re a guy’. I definitely get jerked around.” Of course, to be fair, women
dancing the ladies’ role get ‘jerked around’ quite a bit. This may have had nothing to do
with Adam’s status as a male ‘lady’.
Contra dancer Henry Morganstein encountered a different sort of gendered
treatment when he began dancing the ‘ladies’ role, as he describes in an article posted
online. “…men do not treat me in the same way they do women. I am seldom twirled. I
have yet to undergo what is most hateful to most women: constant twirls by a whole row of
men.” (Morganstein, 1-2)
There have been efforts made on the part of callers to increase ‘gents’ sensitivity in
the realm of initiating ornaments such as twirls. At the Peterborough dance, caller Steve
Zakon-Anderson took special pains during the walk-through to ensure that ‘gents’ and
‘ladies’ each had signals that the other could read, while dancing. “Ladies, if a man goes
like this,” he lifts his hand, “he wants you to twirl. If you don’t want to twirl, do like this.”
He lowers his hand. These sort of signals do get bandied about on the dance floor, but
‘gents’, particularly male ‘gents’ feeling a pressure to perform, still find themselves unsure
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as to whether they are paying close enough attention. Adam in particular finds that even a
combination of verbal and nonverbal cues can leave some ambiguities in place:
“I try and watch for what signal she’s sending, basic things like high left hand or
low left hand for a courtesy turn or a spin, obviously I don’t catch every one of them. A lot
of verbal cues. A lot of dancers, like Megan Welbus for example, likes to courtesy turn,
doesn’t like to spin. She told me that. When I’m dancing with someone I know well, I’ll be
like “Hey! Let’s do this!” Verbal communication is key. But also, there’s times when your
want to throw in lots and lots of ornaments, when you’re dancing with a girl who is as good
of, or a better dancer than you, there’s almost a pressure there to be really flashy, to be
impressive, to do something that makes them go, like ‘Oh!’ Yeah, and you’re like ‘Point!’
I’m always wondering, when I’m dancing with really good female partners, whether, am I
throwing them around a bit, by doing all these ornaments.”
In my own field observations on the dance floor, I found that both male and female
gents would make an effort to show off their improvisational prowess, especially younger
dancers. One young woman dancing the ‘gents’ role initiated a different kind of twirl on
me every time we swung, leaving me somewhat confused, but also challenged to show her
my flexibility and athleticism as a dancer. When I danced the ‘gents’ role myself, I didn’t
so much feel a pressure as an opportunity to perform, with the ‘lady’ as my audience, and
with that opportunity a different sort of agency than I felt when trying to prove myself
through athletic twirls. David, in his efforts to clearly read and convey signals to partners
male and female, can clearly describe a whole spectrum of power dynamics taking place on
the dance floor.
“Well, like, for example, if you’re gonna do a ladies’ chain, or a courtesy turn or
something, who decides to do a twirl instead of a turn? I mean, who decides? I sort of came
to the conclusion that it should be the lady who decides, or whoever’s dancing that part,
because they’re the ones who tend to be surrendering a certain amount of control, and
putting themselves somewhat in the hand of the person who’s gonna do the twirling, who
could conceivably do something incautious that could be injurious. And so I’ve always
thought it was fairest for the person who was going to be in that position to makes the
decision about whether he or she wanted to. And when I’m dancing the ladies’ part and
somebody yanks me into a twirl, I’m relatively light on my feet, and I can do it, but there
are times when I’ll just really emphatically yank my hand back down. And when it’s really
really crowded, even if a women wants to twirl I’ll often not do it because in my better
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judgment it’s too risky, somebody’s gonna get hurt. And at that point I just figure, I’m the
one that’s been doing this the longest, I’m more likely to know, an I’ll just risk disapproval
in taking the more cautious approach, I’m willing to risk that. But for the most part, I think
it should be the prerogative of the person who’s gonna be the twirlee. And, you know, in a
gender-free situation you still have the twirler and the twirlee, and my feeling is that the
twirlee should be making the choice.”
Because David is also a caller, perhaps he feels some responsibility to create sites
of agency for people dancing both roles. Another caller, Beth Molaro, uses her power over
the entire dance hall to do this in a different fashion. Nikki and Kim recall dancing one of
these dances:
Kim: And one year, I think it was only the one year that it happened, Beth Molaro, at the
dance flurry, called, not a gender-role free dance but, ‘dance ‘em all in your partner’s
shoes’, where, the requirement for the dance was to switch your roles. You’re not coming
here to be in the same role. You have to actually find out what it’s like to be the women,
and have a man turn you, and how that can be uncomfortable if you do it wrong! It was
actually teaching them how to be better dancers.
Was it really well-attended?
Kim: It was very well attended, and she handled it very well. This is about learning what
it’s like to be in the other role, and how, if you’re a better dancer, your partner will have a
better dance.
Nikki: But, she did a couple where you had to change roles, and then after that it was like,
well you can dance whatever roles you want. And a lot of people fell right back into the
male and female roles.
Kim: Society’s tough.
Hannah found herself at the mercy of a caller with a similar agenda:
“I remember dancing, this was in Asheville, we’d all gotten our partners, we’d all gotten in
our lines when suddenly the caller said, ‘okay, I want you to switch places with your
partner, and like, you were gonna dance this role, now you’re gonna dance the other role,
get ready.’ Everyone freaked out. Everyone freaked out! Only the really advanced dancers,
you know, in the middle line, were really cool with it. And I was just was on a side line and
of course it fell apart immediately. It was intense, people were like, ‘I’m not ready for this,
I don’t wanna do this,’ a lot of people dropped out of the dance, you know?
The ones who stayed, what did it look like?
Ummmm, I can only tell you, from my partner, he was definitely very controlling and very
frustrated, like, ‘oh, go here, do this’ even though he was dancing the female role, and I
wasn’t, like, a competent leader, at that point, and it was difficult for both of us. He was
still in that male, dominant, we gotta do this this way even though I don’t know what I’m
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doing either sort of thing. It was really interesting.”
In both situations, the dancers showed resistance to the caller’s instructions, despite
the popularity of dancing alternate roles. The enforced role-switching scenario lessens the
dancers’ agency, while a dancer choosing to switch roles mid-way through dance gives the
dancer more power, in a sort of a trickster role. This is not to say that some of the dancers
who dropped out when the caller announced the switch weren’t simply uncomfortable with
dancing a different role than the one to which they were accustomed. Certainly Hannah’s
partner, by way of her account, resisted the caller’s instruction in a very gendered fashion.
Still, the two motivations are not mutually exclusive. The dynamic between dancer and
caller is just as multilayered as the lady/gent dynamic. The dancers arrive at a contra for the
most part willing to follow instructions for three hours, but the popularity of improvisation
and mid-dance role-switching demonstrate that re-interpreting the instructions is part of the
fun. David , as a caller, takes a sort of pleasure in observing the ways in which a roomful of
dancers attempt to deny their enjoyment of a specific dance he likes to call, which renders
every other couple in a line ‘inactive.’
“You get to do some swinging, you get to do a ladies’ chain, you get to walk down
the center and back, and there’s a little period of time when only the active couple is
swinging and the inactives are watching, and I think a lot of people actually enjoy that,
even they won’t let on. For the most part they really wanna be active all the time, they don’t
wanna have somebody else be active while they watch. But I think in a dance like ‘the Lady
of the Lake’ they, without wanting to admit it publicly, they actually sort of enjoy, you
know. Suspense. A little people watching.”
Even the term ‘inactive’ implies a lack of agency. When I observed contras in this
format, I saw inactive couples doing everything from other dance forms such as
step-dancing to belly dancing to punkish jumping and flailing about, while they waited to
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become ‘active’ again. Thus they re-interpret the instructions to gain more agency through
intervals of free improvisation.
Youth Culture and the Future of Contra Dance
When my informants described their community to me, they emphasized how
features such as males in skirts and openness toward performance of ‘gents’ and ‘ladies’
roles reflect well on the groups of people with whom they dance. David used the words
‘hospitable’ and ‘tolerant,’ words which imply that not everyone is performing these acts,
but nobody takes issue with them. Nikki repeatedly described the contra community as
consisting of ‘fringe people’:
“In some respects, our society as a whole has become much more homogenous, you know,
if you don’t do this, if you don’t do this, there’s something wrong with you! You have to
have this, you have to have that. Maybe it’s just that the fringe people are just more willing
to experiment with things.”
“Fringe people” are thus valuable for their willingness to see around the societal structures
that keep the larger ‘homogenous’ world in place. Within these narratives are implications
that the struggle for freedom of gender expression goes on within the rarefied space of the
contra dance as well as in other social spheres. When my informants mentioned occasions
of intolerance, they tended to frame them as exceptions that prove the rule, and generally
relayed these anomalies with a sort of indignant pleasure. For instance, Hannah introduced
the following account with an enthusiastic appeal to tell me a story.
“This story bothered me. It made me angry. So I took my mother and her partner,
ex-partner now, I guess, dancing with me when they came to visit warren Wilson the first
time, and I was like, I love contra dancing, you should come! So, they went to the lesson
beforehand, and they partnered up together, and they guy leading it, the caller for the night,
um, was like, he talked to my mom’s partner, who was dancing the lead, and, like,
my mom and her partner do ballroom dancing all the time, and my mom follows and her
partner leads, so they got in those positions, and the caller goes up to my moms partner and
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is like, you’re gonna want to learn the female role, as a female, and she was like, ‘I’m going
to dance the male role, I always lead, I’ll ask females to dance, and I’m okay with that, I’m
gonna lead’, and he was very much like, ‘I don’t know about that,’ so like, and they lined
up to dance, and a person behind them was very adamant about it too, and was like, you
know, ‘you’re gonna wanna learn this role, bla di bla di bla’. It was very weird, and they
felt very uncomfortable about it, and very much like, ‘we don’t feel very comfortable in
this community and we don’t wanna be here’. And I don’t think Sandy, her partner, felt
like, you know, if she had wanted to dance with someone other than my mother that she
could have easily gone out and found a partner, you know? It like, it’s okay for gender
bending to happen with your friends, like, two men who know each other dance with each
other, two women who know each other dance with each other, but I think that strangers of
the same gender don’t usually dance together, and I think that’s sort of taboo, to ask
someone of the same gender, mostly I think cause like, if I’m a female and I don’t know
how to dance the male role but I really wanna dance with another woman, then what do I
do? And so, that’s for me why I learned the male role, because I was like, ‘look at those
cute girls, I wanna dance with them!’ [laughs]
Hannah’s attempt to show what she loves about contra dancing to her family was
thus thwarted by attitudes she can only describe, in the contex of the Asheville dance
community, as ‘weird’. At the same time, such instances of intolerance can inspire a
general questioning of some gender structures which still hold sway, limiting the free
gender play that Hannah values as a younger dancer. Dancers of the same gender dancing
together do, on the whole, tend to be people well-acquainted with one another, and there
are certainly notorious, popular male-male and female-female couples who appear again
and again within a given dance community. I myself have never encountered hostility
when asking women I don’t know to dance with me. At the same time, especially if they
are new dancers, I tend to find myself, by proxy, dancing the ‘gents’ role, thus assuming
more responsibility for our smooth integration with the rest of the couples in a line. Such
attitudes can also vary from person to person within a given community.
The desire to further embrace the gender mutability possible in contra dancing,
while attempting to eliminate scenarios of intolerance such as this have given rise to the
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subset of contra dancing known as “gender-role free” contra, or, alternately, by the
stranger-sounding but more commonly used title, “gender-free” contra. Chris Ricciotti,
who many acknowledge to be the founder of this phenomenon, describes the most obvious
structural difference , in his manual for potential gender-free callers.
“Gender-free dancing is a style of traditional dance philosophy where the caller
uses non-gender-specific language to indentify the traditional gender-roles of the dance in
teaching as well as calling. It is a philosophy that encourages dancers to dance either role
with anyone on the dance floor, regardless of their sex, gender or gender identity.”
(Ricciotti, 2)
David calls gender-free dances from time to time. The roles which, at ‘mainstream’
dances, are titled ‘ladies’ and ‘gents’, are called by other names, which run the gamut from
descriptive terms like ‘lead’ and ‘follow’ or ‘armband’ and ‘bare arm’ (dancers are
provided with armbands at some dances) to the more whimsical, though equally binary
‘moons’ and ‘stars’ or ‘spiders’ and ‘flies’. As a caller who began calling before the
gender-free community emerged, his approach to these titles was perhaps more playful
than the fledgling community expected, but also informed by a general zeitgeist within
mainstream dances, wherein their approach to the roles was shifting.
“And at the same time, I think that, I remember I made a very definite decision that when I
was teaching, and there were same gender couples in the set, I would use term ‘whoever’s
dancing the ladies’ role’ or ‘whoever’s dancing the gent’s role’ rather than just saying
‘ladies do this’ or ‘gents do this’ and I still do that, and in fact it was kind of funny, I was at
a gender-free camp, and they were using armbands, whoever used the armband was the
‘band’ and whoever didn’t use the armband was the ‘bare’, you’d say ‘bares chain’ or
‘bands turn by the left’ or whatever, and I thought it was really funny because for a long
time had been using these terms like, ‘whoever’s dancing the ladies’ role’ and I thought it
would be particularly entertaining, particularly because some people weren’t wearing
armbands at all, to say, ‘whoever’s dancing the armbands’ role’ and there were a bunch of
people who weren’t wearing bands and so I said ‘whoever’s dancing the armband’s role,
turn by the left’ but they didn’t like it! They thought that was weird. And they told me to
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stop doing it, so Saturday I stopped doing it.”
He also recognized differing ways in which the community drew its boundaries as it
evolved:
“I think that that community, for awhile, was very insulated, and those dances were very
specifically for members of the gay community. And then it sort of became ‘members of
the gay community and their friends’. And I think at some point, they decided, or it just
sorta happened that those dances became not only more welcoming to everybody but also
more encouraging to everybody to come take part, so it was no longer where a particular
population got together by itself, but where a particular population welcomed the larger
population to come and join them.”
Nikki and Kim attend these dances with some regularity, as a supplement to the
mainstream dances that first attracted them to the dance form. They recognize one
particular role that the gender-free dances serve, as a coded arena for romance within the
gay community, a sort of anti-bar-scene. This tends to limit the spectrum of people who
attend.
Kim: Definitely. We go to both.
Nikki: I think that most people, it’s like Kim said, it’s code word for gay. I think a lot of
straight people, when they see ‘gender free’…
Kim: So they’re a couple, and they’re like ‘What are we gonna do on Saturday night?’
‘Let’s go to the gay dance!’ [laughs]
Nikki: They’ll wait for the next regular dance. But I really think that the reason gender free
dances started was to give gay people the same kind of opportunity… I think that’s why,
and I think that at some level, everybody recognizes that, that that’s why there’s
gender-free dances. Because if it was just to dance, then the straight dances would be as
good as [mainstream dances, for this purpose]
At the same time, gender-free dances have become a fixture at larger folk festivals where
contra dancing is popular, so the two communities still get a chance to mingle and inform
one another.
Nikki: Well, I think in some respects, I think the gender free dances are shoring up the way
people think about gender, in that, if we were really breaking down gender, I think at the
mainstream dances, somebody gay could hit on somebody else, and if they weren’t gay,
they would just say, ‘oh, you know, sorry. I’m flattered, but. I don’t dance on that side of
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the floor.’ and that would be the end of it. But, because that’s not the case, that’s really why
you need the gender-free, and I don’t know if the mainstream dances are really gonna get to
that point.
Kim: Well, they will when we get too old to dance, and the twenty-somethings become the
forty-somethings.
Do you think that will eventually happen?
Kim: I think that more of that attitude, like, I don’t care who I’m dancing with, I’m just
having fun. The more that gets adopted, the more the gay community will start going to
those dances because it won’t matter. So, they’ll be able to hook up, and still be at a large
dances.
Nikki: I think that the contra community is very welcoming, and I think that having the
gender role free contras at the festivals is a way of welcoming the gay community, saying
yeah, we want you here as well. But, I do think that the gender-frees at festivals are
different that the gender frees in, like, Jamaica Plain. You know, there are some guys who
go to the festival , who dance the women’s role at the gender free but would never dance
the women’s role at the regular dances. Because they get permission.
When I first took on gender within the contra dance community as a research topic, I felt a
pressure to zero in on the gender-free dances, but Nikki and Kim assured me that the same
remarkable patterns of gender expression take place in both communities, and that the
mainstream dances are just as likely to be a site of dramatic shifts in attitudes towards
gender.
Nikki: Don’t think that just because there’s gender-free dances…I mean, in what other
environment do you see men wearing skirts? You know, sometimes you see them at the
festivals, even though they’re not dancing, they’re wearing skirts, you know, like at Falcon
ridge.
Kim: In general, men get a chance to express anything like that, if they have any kind of
inclination to be like, you know, ‘I’d like to try that!’ they can’t do it. So in that way it’s a
really safe community.
Nikki: I think there is that kind of breaking of gender rules there. The fact that there are
even some men dancing with men is a huge, huuuge break from tradition.
Within the mainstream contra community, attitudes towards dancing with a person of the
same gender have shifted to he point where sexual orientation, when it does surface in
intra-partner interactions, does not disrupt the dance. Adam recalls a particular encounter.
“So, I was at Falcon Ridge, and I dance with this guy who was very prominently displaying
his homosexuality, and I danced with him a lot, and I danced they guy’s role, and he danced
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the girl’s role, that’s what he wanted to do, and he took that as an indication that there was
some sexual aspect to it.”
Does that happen to you a lot?
“No. That was the only time. I don’t think I’ve ever danced with another guy that I knew,
for certain, was openly gay.”
Homosexuality, here, is something a dancer ‘displays’. Adam’s attitude towards this
display, even though he hasn’t frequently encountered it, is one of comfortable
nonchalance. It is also worth noting that he doesn’t doubt he’s danced with other gay men,
he just can’t tell from dancing with them, because their interactions were not about
romance between dance partners. Kim distinguishes between the gender-free and
mainstream significances of same-gender partners. “So the gender-free dances really
provide that opportunity. Men to actually dance with men and find a partner.” When I
mention that I see men dancing together all the time, she insists, “But they’re not
necessarily gay, they’re just dancing with each other.”
Adam’s emphasis on the role dancing in general (and switching genders mid-dance
in particular) plays in his life is also telling, the desire to “do more with [my] body, which is
what dancing is about, expressing your body, and doing things with it.” As a younger
dancer, he is part of a wave of contra dancers that community members of the previous
generation, such as Nikki and Kim, look to with optimism.
Their perception, and their hope, is that this generation of dancers are more
interested in movement than aligning themselves with a given role and it’s connotations.
Nikki: I assume that if they keep dancing, they’re gonna change contra-dancing. I think
they’re going to take it to the next step of that whole, ‘it doesn’t matter who you dance
with’
Kim: Really breaking through thatNikki: The whole gender thing, and the whole…those are the people I really see, you
know, the young boys will dance with the boys, and they just really don’t care.
Kim: They’re just having fun.
Nikki: ‘I wanna dance, you’re available, let’s go dance!’ I think people of our generation
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still see it as a, for lack of a better way to put it, mating ritual.
Kim: But they’re just totally there to dance. Because, one you take away that ‘I’m here to
hook up with someone,’ as opposed to ‘I’m here to get as much exercise and dance as much
as I can.’
Nikki: I think what I’m trying to say is, the emphasis is shifting.
Kim: And they really just don’t have those boundaries. I’d say that would be the biggest
change.
Hannah’s appraisal of the situation is similar, but takes on a more politicized tone. She
describes the contra community in general as ‘radical,’ and responds to the title
‘gender-free’ with this manifesto.
“Let me just say that the term “gender free” makes me uncomfortable in certain ways
because I don’t want to destroy gender. To me, what might be more appropriate might be
‘gender fuck’, you know?
I know what you mean, I didn’t name them myself.
I just wanted to say, because destroying gender would not be a goal of mine. More like just
to, like, reconstruct what we’re okay with, and really bend those roles. Not to do away with
gender, but to expand its definition. I mean, to instead of calling it the male, you call it the
lead, and instead of the female, you call it the follow, in that way you’re getting rid of the
prescribed, like, where you’re gonna be, what you’ll be doing. But, I don’t know. I think,
like, Asheville’s a really radical community, and I don’t know if in like, Tulsa, Oklahoma,
where they might have like ten or fifteen people at the dances on a good night, like, do they
gender fuck? Like, maybe not.”
Here, Hannah is posing an interesting question. “Tulsa, Oklahoma,” is, in this case, a sort
of designated ‘other’ location, one outside the ‘radical’ discourse on gender than Hannah
enjoys. So, outside of these dance communities, what repercussions does this radical
approach have?
Later in our interview, she presents me with one possible answer to her own question
“It’s, you don’t necessarily have to talk to people, you don’t necessarily have to have social
skills, it’s a place where you can just go and relate to people, and they’ll even ask you to
dance, so you don’t have to step up. I mean, its not like going to a discussion group or
something where you’re gonna sit in the back and be singled out because everyone’s
moving and I think that like, you can be drawn in, you know? And I think the culture
perpetuates itself, like you see people that you know from contra dancing and you hang out
with them. The same sort of people get roped in. it just replicates itself.”
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Nikki and Kim see the contra dancing demographic as a very specific population, which
can make the self-replicating community all the more circular and thereby unlikely to cast
much of a shadow on widespread attitudes towards gender.
Nikki: …For some reason, it does attract, the very liberal, progressive people.
Kim: Although there are republicans who go contra dancing.
Nikki: Although I don’t know of any. It doesn’t attractKim: the traditional, that traditional gender role, ‘this is what girls do and this is what boys
do, and we don’t wanna be confused.’
Nikki: I think it’s at the point where you’re only gonna tend to get open-minded people
because the community has evolved to a point where, you know, someone like me can
come to the dance, and that’s fine.
Kim: And you’re usually coming with someone you know, and that person’s gonna be, you
know, a more progressive person, you’re less likely to just wander into a dance.
Nikki: And if a conservative person came to a dance, they’d look around and say,
Kim: ‘What is this?’
Nikki: ‘This isn’t for me’ and walk out. So I think it’ll continue to be progressive and open,
and it’ll continue to grow.
As the contra dance community embraces less-conventional approaches to gender, it is also
limiting its reach as far as which beginning dancers become attracted to, and absorbed by,
the community. As closed a community as mainstream contras can seem, the gender-free
dances are even more so, as far as racial or sociopolitical diversity is concerned.
Mainstream dances nonetheless exhibit startling diversity in terms of age and gender
expression. And, at the mainstream dances, a steady stream of new potential dancers
continue to flow in, even if all of them don’t stay.
Kim: We’d like to think we’re just helping America along there, just shifting that
paradigm. Can we do it? Can we do it?
Nikki: I think, very slowly…
Kim: Well, we see new dancers come into the Woodstock dance all the time. People that
have never shown up before, and going, ‘What is this?’ because they’ve never seen men in
skirts before, or transgendered people, or girls dancing with girls, or any combination of
possibilities that you don’t see walking down the street.
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One important thing that the gender-free dances have accomplished, by branching out with
a gender-related title and mission statement, is to bring the some of the unspoken
gender-related transitions already quietly thriving in the mainstream dances out into the
dialogue. Even if, as Nikki and Kim posit, the gender-free dances render themselves
obsolete as younger dancers flock to larger mainstream contras, ‘gender’ has entered the
dancers’ discourse.
Conclusion
Even as the roles called ‘gents’ and ‘ladies’ become more fluid, or at least multiple
in their accepted expression, the roles called ‘male’ and ‘female’ have hardly fallen out of
use within the contra dance community. This may be the most profound contradiction i
encountered in my research.The question remains: what repercussions does the mutability
of ‘ladies’ and ‘gents’ have on dancers’ conceptions of that other, more widespread binary
gender system? Is it possible that even as dancers’ verbal communication continues to hold
these roles in place, their nonverbal communication on the dance floor is conveying other
messages between dancers? Contra dancers, as a group, can be said to be striving to
increase their own individual agencies in a multiplicity of ways. Choosing to dance in a
skirt, for the male dancers who prefer it, is about ‘freedom of movement’. So, in some
ways, is the increasing emphasis on improvisational response to the calls which dictate
dancers navigation of the floor. The shift in dominant contra discourse is away from
structure, whether it be an article of clothing or a volley of instructions from the stage. Both
of these structures are gendered in some, but not all, of the ways they might limit a dancers
experience. A man’s freedom to enjoy dancing in a skirt despite its gendered status is a
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triumph over our current societal gender norms. The freedoms which he enjoys while
dancing in that skirt are more multilayered. The more frequently they are experienced by
male dancers, the less gendered they become.
The decision to improvise or dance either role both stretch the meanings of the
words used by the callers, words like ‘gent’ or ‘lady’, or commands like ‘Gents
allemande!’. The language remains intact, but its meanings are multiplying as they move
about on the floor. Gender-free dances made a significant contribution by insisting on the
word ‘gender’, a specific way of discussing ‘male’ and ‘female’ which can imply the ways
in which they are socially constructed. At a larger dance festival, if dancers want to attend
every contra that takes place over the course of the weekend, the word ‘gender’ will be on
their lips. The sort of comfortable discussion of gender which took place between my
younger informants and I could potentially open to include all generations of contra
dancers.
“Dance” can be used metaphorically to describe an intersubjective relationship
between two simultaneously true perspectives. They feed one another, and inspire one
another, but neither conquers the other, nor do they merely coexist in balanced stasis. If
two ideologies are dancing together, no matter how contradictory they may seem, they are
not mutually exclusive. The the role of a skirt as both a liberating technology and a
gendered symbol, for instance, are simultaneously true, both contradictorily and
relationally. Even as gender-free dances take an admirable stab at combating some existing
biases within the dance community, the continuing use of ‘ladies’ and ‘gents’ is also
accomplishing something profound. Gender is in motion, located in multiple
interpretations allover the dance floor. Nikki and Kim have even witnessed this use of
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‘ladies’ and ‘gents’ at the gender-free dances, which could even entail that those words are
losing their gendered connotations, or becoming more performance-oriented.
Nikki: I was at the Beth Molaro gender-free, and she was like, I’m gonna use ‘ladies’ and
‘gents’ because that’s the way the dances are written and that’s what I’m gonna do. And
she said, don’t get all worked up about it.
Kim: But if somebody comes at you and they’re not necessarily a gent, don’t panic. It’s
okay.
Nikki: It doesn’t mean anything! It’s a lot nicer than saying lead or follow.
Kim: It is a permission.
Nikki: It’s a permission to step out of that role, and I think it’s a reflection of society.
Which could be another two hour discussion.
‘Ladies’ and ‘gents’ are no longer presented as solid but comprised of myriads of dancing
particles. Pinning them down is aside from the point. This is also an insight ethnographers
and theorists can gain from the research and discussion of social dance. Gender is
performed onstage, but also daily, and its systems are constantly in motion. Continuing
ethnographic research into social dance can further demonstrate the ways in which these
words are used differently, not merely from location to location, but from moment to
moment.
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Bibliography:
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York, NY:
Routledge. 1990.
Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York, NY: Routledge. 2004.
Collins, Jim. “Who Still Follows the Pied Piper of Canterbury?” Yankee
Magazine December 1995. 6 pages. 12/28/2005.
http://www.laufman.org/Yankee1995.htm
Davis, Kathy. Embodied Practices: Feminist Perspectives on the Body. SAGE
Publications, Ltd.: Thousand Oaks, CA. 1997.
Ferguson, James. Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the
Zambian Copperbelt. University of California Press: Los Angeles and Berkely, CA. 1999.
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Routledge: London and New York.
1987.
Holden, Rickey. The Contra Dance Book. Newark, NJ: American Squares, 1956
Jennings, Larry. Give-and-Take. Cambridge, MA: New England Folk Festival
Association, Inc., 2004
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.
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Nevell, Richard. A Time to Dance: American Country Dancing from Hornpipes to Hot
Hash. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 1977.
Polhemus, Ted. “Dance, Gender and Culture” Thomas, 3-15
Ricciotti, Chris. The Gender-Free Dance Manual. 3rd Edition. January 28, 2006
Thomas, Helen. The Body, Dance, and Cultural Theory. Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Thomas, Helen, ed. Dance, Gender and Culture. Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 1993.
Walsh, David. “Saturday Night Fever: An Ethnography of Disco Dancing.” Thomas,
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Ward, Andrew H. “Dancing in the Dark: Rationalism and the Neglect of
Social Dance.” Thomas, 16-29
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Original Interview Questions:
Did you grow up participating in the contra community?
Who introduced you to contra?
How?
When?
What were your early impressions of the dance community?
Did you have any preconceived notions about what it would be like?
What surprised you when you first started dancing?
(Did you feel immediately welcomed by the community?
Why or why not?)
How do you feel about the way people dress in this community?
Do you dress differently when you go to dances than you do generally?
How?
(Is this liberating? How so?)
(Was it the first time you had seen guys in skirts?)
What gender do you identify yourself as?
How frequently do you dance with a same-gender partner?
Do you more frequently dance the male or female role?
Why?
How has the atmosphere at dances changed since you first started dancing?
What attracts you to the contra community?
How far out of your hometown will you travel for dances?
Do you see your participation in this community as a part of your identity?
How do you express it?
Is there anything about the dance community that makes you uncomfortable?
What kind of behavior would you consider to be unacceptable at a dance?
(Can you give an example?)
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Have you tried to address these issues?
How?
Did it work?
Why do you think contra has lasted as long as it did?
Where do you think it is going?
What other social networks or organizations in this community do you belong to?
How does the contra community differ from these other communities?
How is it alike? Supplementary/complementary?
What does the contra community offer that the larger community does not?
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