Kris is busy/lazy today....and has been for the past 461 days. Oh well...
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Dancing is a relatively safe form of intoxication
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Dancing is a relatively safe form of intoxication
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Stairwell Sisters not wasted at Durango dance
Residents stomp, hoot and holler to San Francisco band
April 17, 2007
By Mike Clark | Special to the Herald
Judging by the whoops and hollers filling the Elks Club, the event billed as a "rural Saturday night celebration" will be part of the Durango Bluegrass Meltdown for a long while. One of the special events of last weekend's annual bluegrass festival, Saturday night's Old Time Barn Dance featured clogging, square dancing, contra dancing and assorted buck steps and sashaying around the dance floor to the old-time musical accompaniment of San Francisco's all-women band, the Stairwell Sisters.
The doings had a decidedly family atmosphere, with kids underfoot and the organization on the loose side. One complication is that not a lot of people know precisely how to do all those steps, so the evening began with a lengthy workshop by Stairwell Sister, Evie Ladin, hitting the high points and the women in the audience - a 4 to 1 majority - enthusiastically joining in.
For the most part, the men either sat with arms folded and eyes glassy, or made their appearance on the dance floor doing a nonspecific shuffle rather like being in a strange church and singing the hymns without knowing the words.
Still, not having the dances down cold didn't appear to curb anyone's enthusiasm. This crowd of 200 or so looked as though their natural habitat might be the library or in front of a computer, but they were primed to cut loose Saturday night.
This was dancing for people who don't normally dance, but the general ignorance of the steps put everyone on an equal footing, so to speak - even the kids. So the crowd overflowing the Elks Club and crowding the dance floor was by no means the hippest group ever gathered in Durango. The dress code was Counterculture Formal. But there wasn't an ounce of pretension to be found, and they were having as much fun as any group I've seen in a long time.
The Stairwell Sisters, one of the Meltdown's headline bands, plays for a lot of contra dances and hoedowns in the San Francisco Bay area and seemed right at home patiently obliging newbies and experts alike with a solid instrumental backing. There were times, though, when the Stairwell Sisters playing for our haphazard selves had an air of overkill, like the Beatles doing a bar mitzvah.
Not that anyone else noticed. They were too busy do-si-doing and promenading to steps like "Monkey in the Middle" and "Drop the Clutch and Let 'Er Go" to be bothered. As the evening shifted from dance instruction to dance expression, the raucous group of dancers made it hard for Evie and company to be heard at times.
So if an evening of foot-stompin', whistlin', whoopin' and hollerin' fun, to the tune of accomplished old-time "Brother, Where Art Thou"-style music sounds like something you want to try, sorry. You missed it for this year.
But you might want to lay out your best T-shirt and Tevas for 2008's barn dance. And here's a tip for the organizers of the Meltdown: Guys, you're gonna need a bigger dance floor.
mike@h2xinc.com.Mike Clark is a freelance writer who lives near Chimney Rock.
Young, old, beginner and expert all twirl to contra beat at Club Tico
By KELLI LACKETT
KelliLacket at coloradoan.com
If you can walk, you can contra dance.
And no matter how well or how badly you do it, you'll end up dancing with just about everyone in the room.
About 150 people showed up on a recent Saturday at Club Tico to move their feet to the piano, guitar, fiddle and mandolin stylings of the Northern California band the Fiddlerats.
"I love the energy and the crowd here," said Amy Hancock, a 36-year-old massage therapist from Loveland who has been contra dancing for four years.
No Saturday night is the same, Hancock said.
"There are different callers, different combinations, different partners," she said.
Contra dancing is a form of American folk dance set to jigs, reels and hornpipes. It is descended from English country dancing, which also became popular in France in the 18th century. Some people compare contra dancing to square dancing, but once you see contra dancing in person, it's clear that they are different beasts.
You can square dance for years and still be considered a beginner. But learning to contra dance only takes an hour … theoretically.
I was among the few dozen people who showed up for free lessons an hour before the dance started. As the band tuned up, everyone shuffled around with their hands in their pockets, not knowing what to expect.
Finally, Randy Crump took charge of the lesson. Crump is one of the founders of the Friends of Traditional Dance, which has organized contra dances and other community dances in Fort Collins. The group hosts contra dances at Club Tico on the first, third and fifth Saturdays of each month. But there’s an opportunity to dance just about every night of the week somewhere on the Front Range.
Jonathan Feiman, a Fort Collins architect and project manager, was kind enough to be my partner for the lesson. Feiman had never danced before but he had a knack for it.
“I was looking for a way to learn to dance. I wanted to start with something that wasn’t terribly complicated” Feiman said.
We formed two long lines — men on one side and women on the other. Crump began to demonstrate steps such as the do-si-do, allemande, balance and the dizzy-making “swing.”
If you don’t master the steps with your partner, you’ll have plenty of opportunity to try them with others as you repeat the patterns as you move down the line of partners.
“What’s nice about contra dance is everybody is at different levels. If you have difficulty, someone will help you,” Feiman said.
For the rest of the night the dances were made up of differing sequences of the basic steps. The beauty of contra dancing is that your feet don’t have to do much except get you in the right place in the line. And the caller walks-through every dance before it starts.
“It’s really fun. And it’s pretty easy to do,” said 19-year-old Marie Johnson, who was contra dancing for the first time.
The regulars — who range in age from 19 to 90 — trickled in as the lesson ended and soon the floor was jumping with swirling skirts. No one who wanted to be on the dance floor was left out, though unless you’re in great shape you’ll have to sit one or two out to drink some water.
“You can come as a single and meet a whole community of friends. You can dance with the whole line,” said Longmont resident Linda Maguire. “Everybody is friendly and easy-going and will help you along.”
Maguire started contra dancing in 1998 to try something new while healing from separating from her husband.
“I laughed the whole time,” Maguire said.
Maguire was hooked. Whenever she travels, she finds a contra dance to attend and takes part in contra dancing camps around the country. She met her partner Brian Klock through contra dancing.
“You make lifelong friends,” Maguire said.
While I love world music and African dance, my home base is traditional American music and dance. In particular, you’ll find me contra dancing every Friday. The odds are that you haven’t heard about contra dancing, so let me explain that its initial roots are in England, but by now it’s as American as, well, apple pie. When I’m on a contra line, I’m sharing that line with colonial Vermonters of the Green Mountain Boys era and every generation of Americans before and since. We dance to live music, with New England, Appalachian, and Celtic tunes being the dominant influences. Many of our dance moves are the same as in square dancing, though we are arranged in long lines of couples rather than squares.
This is a quintessential American experience harking back to an earlier era. Live acoustic music, not the DJ- and rock-oriented club scene. No alcohol or drugs—people come only to dance and socialize. We often share potluck meals or snacks. It’s truly intergenerational, with everyone from grandparents to teens and young children dancing with each other. Dance flirtation is encouraged, but try to go beyond that and you’ll be invited to find a different venue. At a contra dance weekend, everyone adopts the young kids by looking out for them so their parents can dance too. This is a uniquely American cultural community, found in hundreds of towns and cities across the nation.
Why do I bring this up? Because in 15 years of contra dancing and all the conversations I’ve had with the other dancers when we’re not on the floor, I cannot think of one conservative among them. Occasionally one will show up for one or two dances, but they don’t come back. I don’t know why, but from conversations with a few of my conservative friends who know of my strange obsession, I suspect they find it too quaint, too hokey for their tastes. They prefer the more fashionable forms of dance and partying that are popular in the suburbs, the synthesizer over the fiddle, the country club over the Grange hall. Heck, they don’t even know what a Grange hall is. So from my personal experience in social and cultural traditionalism, I’d say Weyrich and Lind have their work cut out for them, culturally perhaps more than politically.
But wait. All this was true in contra dancing until a couple of years ago. Inexplicably and spontaneously, at dances across the country, high-school and college students have discovered this ancient art form and taken to it with all the energy and enthusiasm you’d expect in their age group. Church youth groups are beginning to come together to our dances. And from conversations with the kids, particularly at rural dances outside metropolitan Washington, D.C., I know that a surprising number of them are home schooled. Being outside the cultural mainstream already, they have no problem with a dance form that might be sneered at by the “in” kids at school. And their parents certainly have no problem with the wholesome atmosphere at the dances.