Miscellaneous Writings |
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Contra Dancing in New
England
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I had pulled out my keyboard and Palm Pilot to write some impressions. I
was in a classroom, surrounded by 5th graders. I told them that I learned to
type on a typewriter when I was their age. "What's a typewriter?" one girl
asked. "Do any of you know what a typewriter is?" I asked. None did. I'm in New Hampshire with Jacquelene and Dudley Laufman who are conducting a school program, teaching old style contra dances. Nothing modern, but the old style, 19th century versions. I spent the morning yesterday with them in their cozy two room cabin talking about my project and dances and people we knew in common. He freely admits to being a curmudgeon and not caring for the dance scene now, all computer programmers now he says. Nothing like the working class loggers and farmers who didn't care to dance anything complex. This is a man determined to not live in this century, or the previous one, for that matter. Sue Rosen was the caller in Concord, Mass, that evening. When I mentioned who I spent the morning with, she just exclaimed, "Oh, Dudley!" She apparently has taken over a dance he once called, and still hears from him about the way it ought to be done. This is a man who would be very much at home in Ireland. Sue looked over the small crowd in the old barn we were in, about 30 of us. "I don't think we need a walkthrough," she said, and proceeded to call, for the first dance, a fairly complex one with a country corners and a hay. Except for one bewildered woman, the line danced flawlessly from the first phrase. |
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