Contra Dance

22 January 2012 by kathleen.

Last night I attended my first contra dance. My fiddle teacher suggested I might want to attend. This is the kind of music I have been studying, and her band was playing. Since my partner was out of town and I had nothing else going on, I decided to go.

In a contra dance, unlike a square dance, groups of four continually form and reform through the dance, so that by the end of the night it is almost certain that you will dance with everyone in the room at least once. And unlike contemporary club dancing with thumping music, dim lighting, and people dancing individually next to each other, in contra dancing you actually touch other people (what a concept!).

I began to get nervous yesterday afternoon. Throughout my life I have found that if ahead of time I think of some bad thing happening it never does. This history prompts me to imagine as many bad incidents as I can, in order to prevent them from happening. The two awful things I could imagine happening were my hairpiece falling off, and my butt (a Classic Curves Veronica 2) sliding down my legs as I danced.

Neither of those things happened, of course. My imagination failed me; unimagined things happened instead. First, during the teaching hour set aside for newbies, I was partnered with someone I worked with 15 or so years ago; he was there with his wife. I was pretty sure he didn’t recognize me since we never worked closely together, but throughout the night I was afraid he’d recognize my voice or some other quirk of my personality and become surly.

This was the first time I ever danced with a man; many men, actually, as the night wore on. I had never danced much as a man, but I had taken some dance lessons 30 years ago. I was hoping I had forgotten all traces of dancing as a man. All night I was tense, clumsy, and slow, partly in fear of giving myself away as a former male, partly because I am on the chubby side, and partly because this was so new to me.

I had also forgotten about testosterone — not mine but that of the men dancing. A few of the men danced like maniacs. I don’t know if they were high on testosterone, or if they thought the faster they swung their partner the better dancer they were. Good Lord! If you’ve never danced with men you have no idea what women go through. I still don’t know if their dancing was extreme, or if my clumsiness was the problem.

The fourth issue was my voice.  It’s usually pretty believably female if you’re looking at me, but as the night wore on, I was getting fatigued and my voice started giving out unladylike grunts.

Overall, I’m glad I had the experience, but at the moment I don’t feel an inclination to repeat it. That inclination could change over the next weeks, because between the scary parts it felt good to move my body and to touch other bodies.

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