Update on gender and contra

Skip this paragraph if you don’t want my ramblings but are instead only interested in gender and contra. So, after contra dancing in New York City all weekend I learned a few new things. One is: even though I did learn a ton of fancy new flourishes that I can do, I don’t have to do them, particularly if there isn’t time. Two is that although I’m pretty good at contra and moderately good at waltz, I’m still not as good as I think I am. Two is: I learned the beginning of blues dancing. Three is: I’m downright bad at blues dancing. And finally, four is that I learned more about gendered language and contra. Most of this information is from a young queer, politically active caller and a young gender queer dancer who’s been dancing for a quantifiably long time. Any information that seems wrong is probably my fault, and not theirs. 

In the previous post I remarked that I didn’t understand why ladies and gents was preferable to lead and follow. The reasoning behind this is because there isn’t really a lead and follow in contra. All the moves in contra are called (the caller tells all the dancers when to do what) and any flourishes that aren’t called are at the discretion of either party dancing, not simply the lead or follow. The caller I was talking to uses ‘ladies’ and ‘gents’ because she doesn’t want to give the people dancing the ladies’ role the idea that they can’t initiate a move. Once ladies and gents have been established, however she uses terms that are as gender neutral as she can make them. ‘Swing your partner’ ‘Swing your neighbor’ ‘pass the next person by the left’. The caller also talked about the importance of using the they/them pronouns. For example, using ‘ladies chain and gents courtesy turn them’ instead of ‘courtesy turn her’. Both the caller and the dancer stated a fondness of the terms ‘larks’ (the person on the left, I think) and ‘ravens’ (who I’m pretty sure is the person on the right). In an ideal world, all dances would be taught with ‘larks’ and ‘ravens’ but since most new dancers are easily confused and already used to the the ‘ladies’ and ‘gents’ terminology, so ‘ladies’ and ‘gents’ are more beginner friendly.