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).