A quick note on dance and gender
Apr. 22nd, 2010 11:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sorcyressSo, Monday at dance! I wind up grabbing ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
_meej_ to dance, for logical reasons --he's fun, and a good dancer, and I don't dance with him nearly enough.
He runs off to grab a drink of water, and I go find us a set. Common courtesy in Scottish Country Dancing states that when the lead is not there while the sets are being formed and counted, the follow stand in the lead position, so as to make it easier to tell how many couples there are. I make a point of doing this, because it's polite to the couple doing the counting, and makes a lot of sense.
For whatever interesting reason, I'm distracted, and don't notice when DJ comes back. So there's a moment, where we're both standing together on the lead side of the dance. We banter, and I take a step towards the follow side.
"I mean, do you want to lead?" he offers, totally sincere.
And so I did. A female lead, which is not totally unbeknownst, and a male follow which almost always is. I thanked him generously after the dance, but I feel it bears repeating here, because honestly? Helping me fuck with the highly gendered lead/follow conventions at dance means SO MUCH to me.
There are reasons to keep a male/female split for set dances, most of them having to do with helping the beginners identify where in the dance they need to be facing at any given time --saying "face the ladies" is a little visually easier than a new dancer trying to remember which side exactly is the follow side, as well as keeping up and down and across the dance all in their head at the same time.
But when you're in a group of people who have some idea of what they're doing? There is no reason1 that women can't lead or men can't follow, and I really do appreciate it every time I see it happen.
((And remember kids! If you know how to lead *and* follow, that means you have twice as many potential people to dance with as the people who only know one!))
~Sor
MOOP!
1: Okay, fine, if we're being really pedantic I'll accept "Allemandes" as a reason. But it's not a boy/girl reason, it's a short/tall reason --it is damn hard for me to lead a significantly taller guy in an Allemande, it's impossible to tell where the hell the arms go. But there are work-arounds for that, and like I said, doesn't have jack shit to do with gender except as far as your average woman is shorter than your average man.
_meej_ to dance, for logical reasons --he's fun, and a good dancer, and I don't dance with him nearly enough. He runs off to grab a drink of water, and I go find us a set. Common courtesy in Scottish Country Dancing states that when the lead is not there while the sets are being formed and counted, the follow stand in the lead position, so as to make it easier to tell how many couples there are. I make a point of doing this, because it's polite to the couple doing the counting, and makes a lot of sense.
For whatever interesting reason, I'm distracted, and don't notice when DJ comes back. So there's a moment, where we're both standing together on the lead side of the dance. We banter, and I take a step towards the follow side.
"I mean, do you want to lead?" he offers, totally sincere.
And so I did. A female lead, which is not totally unbeknownst, and a male follow which almost always is. I thanked him generously after the dance, but I feel it bears repeating here, because honestly? Helping me fuck with the highly gendered lead/follow conventions at dance means SO MUCH to me.
There are reasons to keep a male/female split for set dances, most of them having to do with helping the beginners identify where in the dance they need to be facing at any given time --saying "face the ladies" is a little visually easier than a new dancer trying to remember which side exactly is the follow side, as well as keeping up and down and across the dance all in their head at the same time.
But when you're in a group of people who have some idea of what they're doing? There is no reason1 that women can't lead or men can't follow, and I really do appreciate it every time I see it happen.
((And remember kids! If you know how to lead *and* follow, that means you have twice as many potential people to dance with as the people who only know one!))
~Sor
MOOP!
1: Okay, fine, if we're being really pedantic I'll accept "Allemandes" as a reason. But it's not a boy/girl reason, it's a short/tall reason --it is damn hard for me to lead a significantly taller guy in an Allemande, it's impossible to tell where the hell the arms go. But there are work-arounds for that, and like I said, doesn't have jack shit to do with gender except as far as your average woman is shorter than your average man.