I dance as much as I can afford (in terms of money and time), and as many styles as I find interesting. I consider myself proficient in Scottish Country Dancing (SCD), Modern Western Squares Dance (Mainstream and Plus levels), Regency, contra, English Country Dancing (ECD), Victorian, Civil War, and some ballroom (especially vintage and cross-step waltz).
Currently, I dance SCD and squares weekly, vintage (Regency, Victorian, Civil War, other) and ballroom (waltz, foxtrot, polka, one-step, schottische) about once every six weeks, and contra and ECD about once every three months.
I'm a female-assigned person1 who likes skirts, so I tend to dance the "follow" or "lady's" role2, but I've been actively striving to dance more often on both sides of the set, encouraged by getting to do so when I recently took my first squares level, by the wonderful people at MIT.
This blog is going to write a lot about gender and dance, about roles and dance, about costuming and dance, and about straight-up dancing and dance. It's also going to have a lot of footnotes (because I really like footnotes) and links to other interesting posts and thoughts about the above topics.
Everything I write for this blog is licensed under Creative Commons, with a BY-NC-SA license. That means, feel free to repost or adapt my work (both with credit), but you can't use it commercially without getting special permission.
1: I'm genderqueer, meaning I'm usually happy and comfortable in my female-sexed body, but my internal gender ranges from female to neutral to male, or some combination thereof, depending on my mood. But this blog isn't about that.
2: The exception being Regency, in which I almost exclusively dance the "lead" or "gentleman's" role. And I would like to work more to dance on both sides of the set for that as well.
