Check out this thread in rec.folk-dancing: Humility: The Virtue.

The discussion covers all sorts of issues, including the challenge of keeping a dance series accessible to new dancers and entertaining to experienced dancers. Seems like all dance forms struggle with that; square dancing (MWSD) has clearly failed in its current incarnation.

The thread was started by Bill Martin, a Portland, Oregon, old-time square dance caller and musician. Here’s what he says about getting new people into dancing:

Start up a contra series that is safely separated from the established contra scene by aiming at a new customer base: people who don’t know about contra dancing. Variety – call more than contras. 5 contras is way more than enough. 2 mixers in the first half, like Ted Sannella used to do. Use a progressive dance program to build the newcomer’s skills – don’t put a hey in the first dance, sheesh. Enough with the twisted becket dances. 3 or 4 square dances in the evening, keep them fairly simple to cut down the teaching time. A couple of waltzes, and a schottische (easy to teach.). Maybe a swing dance because people can fake it. They can’t fake a hambo. Maybe even start off with a couple of tiny kid dances. We’ve done that a few times to good effect.

Keep it nice and easy at the beginning of the evening, with only short walk-throughs needed for the first couple of dances, which leaves time to incorporate style tips into the teaching. A mixer early on, another near the break. With this program you will lose a lot of current dancers and pick up a whole bunch of new dancers. Your old-fashioned contra dance will have an inclusive, friendly tone and attract a largely different crowd. And keep it that way. Don’t let the old habits creep back in. If the hotshots and contra nazis don’t like it they will mostly stay away. Better that they stay away until they understand that it is not a pre-school dance for newbies but is a real oldtime traditional style dance party.

Now, how do you get that new customer base? Do it the way it worked out for the Portland square dances. The contra musicians in town are talented and their music can be highly entertaining. Why don’t any of those bands play out in the pubs? At farmer’s markets? Wherever, just like the old-time bands do that now play for the square dances. (The Alberta St. Pub and The White Eagle have dance floors big enough for a short contra line if you want to include some dancing.) At every public or private gig draw attention to your email sign up sheet like we did. In a year or two you will have a couple of hundred addresses of people who like contra dance music even if they have never heard of a contra dance. When their favorite contra music band starts advertising and promoting the new community style contra dance, those people will follow the band. That’s what happened to square dancing in Portland, which is driven by the musicians and their fans.

Dudley Laufman contributed a poem to the discussion: I HOPE THIS IS A REAL CONTRA DANCE, which starts

Is this dance gender free
but w/gender balance*?
Decible free, scream free
w/o deodorants?
Is this gig free of Christmas?
I trust there’s no squares,
all contras improper
w/those gypsies and heys,
neighbor swings and w/partner,
and intense eye contact please,…

BTW, I’m currently in Oregon (called a dance for the Rainbow Wranglers last night); I’m planning to go to one of Bill Martin’s old time square dances this Thursday, on my way to A little more Magic, an Advanced and Challenge weekend in Vancouver.

A new reality show is currently in the planning stages. American Pride is a show dealing with some gay men who will attempt to become the first openly gay mainstream country-western star.

In a cover story on American Pride, published in Nashville Scene magazine, the IAGSDC gets mentioned:

Outside the mainstream, Stevens explains, there is a well-established, if niche-oriented, market for gay country singers. This includes organizations like The International Gay Rodeo Association (IGRA) and the International Association of Gay Square Dancing Clubs (IAGSDC). “Gay country singers regularly perform for events sponsored by these organizations. I’ve sung at a lot of IAGSDC events,” he says. “In fact, I’m living in San Francisco now because the gay square dancing group out there invited me to perform at their national convention. I fell in love with the place, so I moved there.”

Most people get here in fairly obvious ways. But occasionally, the search terms that get here are pretty unusual:

• anthropologist cultural historian social dancing these days isolate individual trance-like self-absorption (This is a reference to one of the quotes that show up randomly on my pages)
• to dance is to take part in the cosmic control of the world (another quote)
• digital computer turntable
• wiggle toes (I have August 6 listed as “Wiggle Your Toes Day”)
• dress codes are bad
• webring hairy women
• dancing nerds
• square dance burnout
• petticoat nostalgia
• klezmer contra
• mac os x mbox to mysql (This sounds like a search I made back when I was trying to figure out how to do an archive of the sd-callers list. I finally gave up on doing a database, and went with indexed html files.)
• square dance personality types

Speaking of dress codes, I came across a goth site advocating dress codes in goth bars so that the author wouldn’t have to look at brightly-colored Gap clothes or (horrors!) Bermuda shorts and Birkenstocks: Dress Codes Please!!!. The comments are also interesting. Seems like dress codes are controversial these days no matter what the culture.

I’ve often wondered how dress codes stand up to sex discrimination arguments (not enough to do legal research on it, but enough to be curious). Here’s some analysis

The law of dress codes

There has been a long-standing anomaly in Title VII case law that permits employers to maintain sex-specific dress and grooming codes. Employers can, for example, require that men wear short hair, while allowing women to grow theirs long. They can also require men to wear business suits and ties, while requiring women to wear dresses.

Decisions upholding these kinds of rules are anomalous because they seemingly permit precisely what Title VII clearly forbids: treating employees differently on the basis of sex. Not surprisingly, the reasoning of these decisions is unconvincing.

To justify the dress and grooming codes at issue, courts have at times resorted to platitudes about employers having the prerogative to run their business the way they see fit. But, of course, there are lots of ways employers might see fit to run their business that we do not allow.

For example, we do not allow employers to hire only white employees, nor to fire older workers and replace them with younger ones. Yet dress code cases, in effect, allow employers to insist on Archie Bunker’s world, where “girls were girls, and men were men.”

Dress codes: Not gender-neutral

Other courts have attempted to claim that dress and grooming codes are not really discriminatory but are actually gender-neutral, because they require men and women alike to adhere to generally accepted community standards. That these standards are different for men and women, and themselves the product of sex stereotypes, is conveniently ignored.

After all, it is not as if, for example, men traditionally happen to wear beige, while women happen to wear navy. Rather, high heels, long hair, and dresses connote particular “female” traits — suggesting the wearer is pretty, sexy, demure, fashionable, or what have you. Conversely, short hair and business suits connote the “male” traits of being no-nonsense, all-business and in control.

Moreover, the extra time needed to take care of long hair, and the impediments to movement that high heels and dresses can impose, suggest that they embody not just a style, but a concept of how women should spend their days, and how they should move and behave.

The sheer time investment in dressing “like a woman” can be daunting. Just ask any businesswoman running, in high heels, to make her plane after blow drying her hair and putting on makeup for an hour. Or better, ask her male colleague, already calmly seated on the plane and reading the newspaper.

So I was doing a search on “dance New Mexico” (we’re thinking about using it for a name). That lead me here: dance Searches, which contains this list of possible dance searches:

Alvin Ailey Dance Costumes, Alvin Alley Dance Troupese, Ann reinking dance, Arthur Murray, Dance, Dance Studios in Gaithersburg Maryland, Dance companies in Phildelphia, Dance salsa, FOAM DANCE FOAMERS, Ice Dance Championship, Info on the dance the Jitterbug, Let, Lord of the Dance, Pineapple Dance Studios, The Diva Dance, Twyla Tharp Dance Troupe, World Ice Dance Figure Skating Championship, aerobic dance choreography, alaska dance, alvin alley dance, alvin alley dance theatre, apache dance, apache devil dance, arkansas dance, autogramme-charles dance, belly dance, belly dance costume, belly dance grand bazaar, buffalo dance, butterfly dance, california dance, calumet dance, carpet dance, character dance, charles dance, choreography dance, clog dance, connecticut dance, country-dance, court dance, cushion dance, dance, dance and movement, dance band, dance choreography, dance clubs in florida, dance costume, dance costuming, dance documentaries, dance drama, dance favor, dance floor, dance fly, dance form, dance hall, dance hall of the dead, dance house, dance leader, dance lessions, dance lesson, dance music, dance palace, dance pantomime, dance patterns, dance program, dance revolution, dance revolution psx covers, dance rhythm, dance salsa, dance shoes, dance society, dance song, dance step, dance studio alvin ailey, dance tune, dance wear, dance with me, dance with me orleans, dance-loving, davidical dance, death dance, devil dance, dinner dance, discount dance shops, dream dance, elegant belly dance, elf dance, ethnic dance, every breath you take dance mix, fan dance, figure dance, fire dance, flash dance, folk dance, ghost dance, hat dance mp3, hawaii dance, how to dance charleston, how to dance salsa, kentucky dance, kissing dance, lap dance and manhattan, lisa, lord of the dance, maine dance, maypole dance, medicine dance, missouri dance, modern dance, moiseyev dance, moor dance, morris dance, musicirish dance, new hamshire dance, new mexico dance, ohio dance, oregon dance, oriental dance, oriental snake dance, orleans best of-dance with me, pennsylvania dance, rain dance, rave dance moves, round dance, salsa dance patterns, scalp dance, school of dance connecticut, shadow dance, skeleton dance, skirt dance, snake dance, square dance, square-dance music, sun dance, sword dance, tag dance, tango dance, tap dance, tea dance, tennessee dance, the history of the dance jitterbug, toe dance, war dance, white oak dance project

Clicking on one of these leads to a page of “results” powered by Find11.com, which seems to have links placed by a pay-per-click site, Search.World11.com. In other words, all of the results are advertisers.

Needless to say, I clicked on “square dance”, and got (after wading through a bunch of unrelated advertised sites, three listings: two party-planning sites, and the Folk Dance Association site, which is trying to make money off a great domain name (folkdancing.org) by charging for listings.

One of the party planning sites, PartyPop.com, said this about square dancing:

Square Dancing is one of the most popular forms of dance for events. Square Dance is just a downright good old time. Square Dancers are available at events either as the performer or as the Dance Instructor. The Square Dance Instructor can be available prior to the event, to give the Bride and Groom, the guests or anyone in attendance of the event Country Dance Instruction. Let the music move you and your guests into dance for an unforgettable night of magic and memories.

. Obviously, PartyPop doesn’t differentiate between Country and Square Dancing. But, amazingly enough, one of their listings (in Indiana) is for square dance caller Mike Argue. I wonder if he’s gotten any bookings through his partypop listing.

I spent this afternoon at the New Mexico State Fair, for this event: 01:30 pm NM Square & Round Dance Assn. – Ford Pavilion (1:30 PM – 2:30 PM), which you can see listed here. It felt pretty schizoid; I think the other caller (an older gentleman) and I were on different wavelengths. He treated it like a dance, albeit without breaks. I treated as entertainment for the crowd (well, the few folks resting their feet in one of the few shadey spots). I tried to end it up on a rowsing singer; he took over and got the dancers into a big circle for a “good night right and left grand” with yellow rocks, and then a big thank you to themselves. Well, maybe that would make the onlookers think we are a fun group to join….maybe.

Then I went and had some “fair food” and watched a young dance troupe of “percussive” dancers, Powerhouse Dance Troupe (nothing on the web that I could find). Four young dancers, in t-shirts and jeans, doing an updated amalgam of traditional dancing: Irish step, clogging, and tap, to very modern popular music. As they said, it was step dancing without the lowered arms and clogging without the petticoats (yes, the leader did mention the absence of petticoats). To me, it seemed like tap dancing (since tap already seems like an amalgamation of other forms) to modern music. Very fun to watch, lots of kids watching. (We had lots of older folks watching the square dancers at the fair; like to like, I guess.)

Lloyd Shaw’s Cheyenne Mountain Dancers, a troupe of high school kids who toured the country in the 1940’s, is generally credited with being one of the sources for the resurgence of square dancing in post-WWII America. Maybe the CALLERLAB Foundation should sponsor a group of kids with some dynamite flying squares routines and send them off to tour the US.

Never been a major Johnny Cash fan, but he’s just always been there.

If you’re calling a dance tonight, you might want to do a Johnny Cash song or two, if you have any in your case. Johnny also did covers of an amazing number of pop songs. You’ll probably have your own songs that you associate with Johnny Cash; here are a few that come to mind when I think of him, and that I know have singing call versions:

• Ring of Fire (released last month as a CD; too bad Ernie Kinney didn’t also release it as an MP3 so you could get it today)
• I Walk the Line
• Daddy Sang Bass
• Ghost Riders in the Sky (lots of people have done this, but it’s on the Essential Johnny Cash album)
• Jackson
• Long Black Veil
• Orange Blossom Special (mostly used for patter, but Bob Howell did something with it back in 1986)
• Tennessee Flat Top Box

Here’s a site where you can listen to Vaughn Parrish call a tip with the calls pronounced “backwards” (with a lot of “flexibility”) while reading a transcription of the tip. So “Wob to the Rentrap” and get started.

I particularly like “Nips the Pot”.

I wonder how long it took Vaughn to be able to call like this.

Found this site because of the song titles. You can listen to:

• Egyptian Barn Dance
• Pretty Petticoats
• Square Dance for Eight Egyptian Mummies (my favorite title)

These were all done in the 1930’s; I wonder if Mr. Scott was a square dancer?

Everybody seemed to have a good time at Dance-A-Rama 2003, the national singles square dance festival, which was held here in Albuquerque over Labor Day Weekend. I was on the staff to cover the C1 workshops; none of the rest of the staff (Deborah Carroll-Jones, Mike Bramlett, Shane Greer, and Art Tangen) do much in the challenge area. We never really had a full C1 square, but we did have a loyal two and sometimes three squares of people doing the intro to C1 workshops, so we just carried that over into the time allotted for C1 dancing.

I signed a lot of Century Books over the weekend; sure hope it wasn’t because they wanted to remember to avoid me in the future…