A quick note on dance and gender

[sorcyress]

So, Monday at dance! I wind up grabbing _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.

Comments

[ljdragon.livejournal.com]

*Rackle likes this

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

At some point in college, Terry was teaching Allemande, and for a moment told the class to look at me and gallian, who were dancing together (and both fairly experienced). A moment later he told them not to look at us, because he had noticed that we were on opposite sides, despite my being nearly a foot taller. So yes, it is definitely possible; the tall person just has to duck on bar 6.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_meej_/]

Oooh! It's always fun when I put LJ usernames together with folk I hadn't known were on LJ. (Not you, but gallian.)

conventions

[woozle.livejournal.com]

You know, maybe it's blindingly obvious from the outside, but it just now struck me (perhaps not for the first time; a mind is a terrible thing to lose...) that those "highly gendered lead/follow conventions at dance" are probably the single biggest reason why I utterly loathed square dancing in middle school. (I went to a somewhat conservative private school. Most of the girls attended "coming out" parties in high school -- the debutante kind, not the LGBT kind. Really. There was a little snippet for each of them in the "society" section of the local paper.)

(P.S. Spellcheck wants to put an accent on "debutante"; I think that's over-dignifying the word.)

insertion

[woozle.livejournal.com]

(I should have finished with) Fight the good fight!

[http://users.livejournal.com/_meej_/]

I appreciate the brain exercise of making sure I can dance either part (and remember what gender I am). If I do end up getting around to teaching, I think that's an important skill to have, so it was a good thing for me too. I've danced on the follow side before, but in all those cases it was with a male as lead.

I will say, though, that I did check the set for beginners that we'd be confusing before I offered... fortunately, there were none, and I figured you'd enjoy. (Thanks for the compliments, too!)

[mneme]

Heh. I'm a mediocre follow (not that that matters as much in choreographed dances) but I'm usually willing to lead or follow -- it's fun!

[leiacat.livejournal.com]

Underarm turns are hard, but it takes for quite a bit of taller-follow difference to make them outright impossible.

For me the hardest thing to lead a much taller person is a tango, because in a close frame it's awfully hard for navigate when one can't see over the partner's shoulder.