After a bitter, hard-bitten fight with a piece of new technology (I thought it was too good for a free Zune to seemingly fall in my lap) I tuned into the internets to realize that I had yet to update this blog today! Woe is me.
Things in Seattle have been surprisingly busy. Although it makes sense if you remember that for approximately 9 months of the year the sun doesn’t shine here. At least not regularly. That makes for a very exciting and busy three months of summer.
Of course, it doesn’t help that I have seemingly stumbled upon oodles of new groups and entertainments. Friends from all around have descended with clubs and parties, meetings and suggestions.
One of these suggestions was contra dancing. Don’t let the name dissuade you, it has nothing to do with either guns or contrariness. Rather, picture any movie based on the Pride and Prejudice books or set in Regency England. Remember all those parties? Those dance scenes? That’s contra dancing.
A “social dance” contra dancing involves couples lining up into two facing lines, called a set. These sets then interact in an elaborate fashion: spinning, swinging, stepping, turning, gypsy-ing (looking deep into eachother’s eyes and rotating), balancing, chaining, and half a dozen other unfamiliar phrasing, all on the cue of the caller who sings out the steps.
All the while a band plays, usually folk tunes, but the beat is much much faster than you would expect. These steps take place in rapid succession and all the while you and your partner, often someone you haven’t actually met or talked to for any length of time, make your way down the line dancing with new couples and groups as you go.
It’s exhilarating, partially because of how quickly the dance changes and weaves and partially because of the social nature of it. Everyone dancing is there to have fun and meet new people and here you are dancing with scores of them in rapid succession, laughing and spinning and trying to make sense of it all while the caller’s changes come all the quicker, the fiddler bows faster, and the hall heats up with rapidly moving bodies and the sound of laughter and rythmic steps.
In the end it was well worth the eight dollars. Well worth it indeed.