Here are some pictures from the New Mexico State Square and Round Dance Festival in Ruidoso. I don’t think I’m visible in any of them. There’s a great picture of my friend Kathi playing a ‘lady of the night” in one of the after-party skits.

I gotta say that I think afterparties are very strange. I haven’t been to that many; after the first one (where they did “There’s a Hole in the Bucket”), I avoided them, until I happened into another (where they did “There’s a Hole in the Bucket”). And guess what! In Ruidoso, they did “There’s a Hole in the Bucket”…I wonder if it’s an unstated requirement that all afterparties must feature “There’s a Hole in the Bucket”.

I also often find afterparty skits offensive, and Ruidoso did its part by doing some lip synch number involving a gay football player (can we say “stereotype”?).

I did a web search on square dancing afterparties, and came across an online diary by a square dancer. Here are a couple of quotes on afterparties. The first is from July 2000:

The afterparty participants had a lot of fun presenting the skits, which is always fun to see, but the skits were silly, silly, silly. It made the afterparty that our club put on after our anniversary dance seem like Shakespeare. (Okay, perhaps that’s an exaggeration.) The best part about the afterparty is that the President’s hubby bought us ice cream.

This is from February 2000:

After Party A few members of our square dance club met to plan the 30th anniversary dance for the club. At the meeting, some of the older members were trying to explain the concept of an after party. Apparently, it’s a show that’s put on by a club after a dance. The show is composed of club members acting in skits or lip-synching songs. Some of us newer members were kind of dubious–okay, I was dubious–about whether people would really be interested in this kind of thing. The older members of the club, however, reminisced about after parties they had attended, assuring us that after parties could be big hits, marking a club as a fun one.

I’m discovering that square dancing has a culture all of its own

We celebrated National Dance Like A Chicken Day today, with much merriment and laughter. Three women made skirts (and vests for husbands where relevant) out of fabric with a chicken pattern. I brought along my Cornelius the Dancing Chicken:

We ate deviled eggs, chicken salad, KFC, etc. I did the Chicken Plucker routine, and sang “Ghost Chickens in the Sky” (with a chorus of cluckers among the people not dancing and with apologies to Deborah Carroll-Jones). I said things like “and you oughta be home with a cluck, cluck, cluck” and substituted “chicken” for virtually every noun in every song. Cecil wanted me to do “Chicken in the morning, chicken in the evening, chicken at supper time”, but I was already doing “Chicken went a courtin'”. In honor of the KFC, I did the Grand Colonel Spin. I’ll bet you all could come with lots of different ideas for chicken-themed songs…let me know.

Speaking of dancing chickens, here’s a Wall Street Journal article about the Chicken Dance.

The Chicken Dance’s secret weapon: It gets even the klutziest wallflower out on the dance floor, because it makes everyone look equally silly.

On the traditional square dance list, someone asked for contras with a “square” feel (more specifically, the asker normally calls traditional squares, but is going to be working with a contra band that doesn’t play the kind of up-tempo fiddle tunes that are good for squares. So he wanted some contras that “that have one dirty boot in the square dance sty”.

This caught my interest because I’ve started calling a few contras, and it seems natural to think about “crossover” type contras. I find myself attracted to contras with “wavy lines” (aka waves), and “swing thru” type moves.

Ridge Kennedy offered a contra he’d written called the Rang Tang Contra (December 2001), which incorporates a two-couple Southern Square move called the Georgia Rang Tang. Looking up “Georgia Rang Tang” in Google led me to an English Country Dance club at Cambridge, which just happens to do Kentucky Running Sets along with their Playford. This led me to their “What are ‘Playford’ Dances” page, which led me to this quote:

In the 1600s English Society got bored with dancing the complicated and difficult-to-learn formal dances (which were very much display dances for couples to show off) and started dancing ‘country dances’ for light relief. Country dances were the dances done by the country folk and had to be easy because country folk didn’t have time to go to lessons, and couldn’t read so they couldn’t look up the dances in a book. The dancing masters rapidly got in on the act and started inventing more complicated ‘country dances’. These compromise dances proved very popular; after all an educated person going to a ball every week or two may well feel a dance simple enough for someone who only goes to a dance once or twice a year is beneath him.

I’m not sure “beneath him” is exactly right; I think it’s more if you’re dancing once a week, simpler dances tend to become boring, and there becomes a market for “new” dances (which the dancing masters provided, obviously). I think this is human nature, and providing a form of entertainment that can (a) keep regulars entertained year after year, and (b) incorporate newcomers easily, is non-trivial. MWSD is on a downhill slide because (simplifying a whole bunch of issues) integrating new dancers is hard both for the new dancers (months of lessons) and the experienced dancers (even after months of lessons, newcomers still have a hard time dancing at speed). Contra dances tread a fine line, maintaining accessibility to new dancers while entertaining long-term dancers; they mostly succeed, but there are issues, both for first-timers (despite best efforts, a contra dance can be confusing) and for experienced dancers (who are tempted to have “special, experienced-only” dances, but instead often go off to dance camps for no-walk-thrus, contra medleys, and more complex dances).

Here’s a site with all kinds of useful dance information for Advanced and Challenge dancers in the Southwest, including a “looking for partners” page. Too bad some of the pages have music. On the main page, the music can be turned off, but on the Arizona page, I didn’t see a way to do it. Too bad. Let me say again…I don’t think music (especially involuntary music) adds anything to a web page.

I’m here in Ruidoso at the Hawthorn Suites. A quick perusal of the room when I checked in revealed…WiFi!!! So not only can I send and receive email and use AIM (no charge as far as I can tell), I can also surf for a pretty reasonable $10/day fee. So here I am.

The sound at the festival is pretty bad, as is the concrete floor. But people are still having fun.

I’m off to Ruidoso this weekend for the state festival (PDF), with Randy Dougherty doing the main calling, and various and sundry state callers also calling tips. I’m sharing an Advanced tip with Fred Weiner tonight, and calling 1/2 hour of Advanced tomorrow afternoon.