Contra Flourish Workshops

June 28th, 2013
contra
A: Dance?
B: Yes! Do you have a preferred gender?
A: Can I be the lady? I don't know how to lead.
The response from 'A' is typical among people who think of contra as something where a major part of the gent's role is leading variations. It's not that 'A' doesn't know how to do the figures from the other side, which isn't really all that different, but that they don't want to be boring. If you think of yourself as a good dancer, and then are put in a position where you're going to be dancing like someone who's much less experienced, you need to be really secure in your social position.

The people you see leading weird things generally learned them slowly over time, with lots of practice and picking things up from other people. I didn't start learning well until I started dancing the lady, picking up flourishes much better by going through them than watching them. It's not that if I came into contra years ago initially dancing the lady instead of the gent I would have learned to lead things faster, but that there were things I needed to learn from dancing both roles. So when I'm 'B' I try to let 'A' know I think they'll do fine as the gent and we'll have a good time either way. This is the general philosophy of learning in contra: we don't have lessons, you learn by doing.

People have different learning styles, however, with some people learning much better from explicit teaching. So I'm wondering: should we have workshops on flourishes?

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Ozy and Vasili Review Lilo and Stitch

Sometimes my seven-year-old, Vasili, wants to see some godawful movie that makes me want to melt my eyeballs out of my head.

via Thing of Things June 27, 2025

Elixir's Last Dance

On May 18th, the contra dance band Elixir had their last gig ever. The dance was packed: there were three hundred people. It was the only dance BIDA has ever done where they sold tickets. People flew from across the country just to hear Elixir play one la…

via Lily Wise's Blog Posts June 5, 2025

Workshop House case study

Lauren Hoffman interviewed me about Workshop House and wrote this post about a community I’m working on building in DC.

via Home April 30, 2025

more     (via openring)