During the fall semester this year, I took up Modern Western Square Dancing ("squares"), by taking MIT's Tech Squares class. Unlike most square dancing groups, which can take 40 weeks to a year to cover the mainstream and plus level calls, Tech Squares crams the program into thirteen weeks. It's quick and intense and you find yourself learning eight to twenty new calls each week. It's a rather intense way of doing it, but fun if you can keep up, and their regular caller is extremely good at his job, as well as being creative enough to keep things adventurous even for the more experienced dancers in the room.
Now, square dancing isn't the only thing that Tech Squares teaches, or the only thing danced at their weekly dance nights. They also teach a monthly Modern Western Rounds Dancing ("rounds") course --each month they focus on calls for a different type of dance, like cha-chas, foxtrots, one-steps and two-steps, or waltzes. Paying for squares means you can get into the rounds class too, and several people have asked me if I plan on trying it.
I had never seen called couple dancing before I first witnessed rounds. I have been doing couple dance longer than any other form of dancing1, and I have watched many extraordinary dancers spin into interesting variations and beautiful figures. Couple dancing is, to me, something to be created anew every time, a dance form filling the grey area between dancing by oneself, which is often completely dictated by your own creativity, and dancing in a set, where you follow the prescribed set of figures, a prescribed number of times.
When I first was introduced to the idea that couple dancing could have all the creativity sucked out of it, and be reduced to just rote repetition of someone else's chosen figures, I found myself utterly repulsed. While my repulsion has softened some, I am still not at all interested in learning how to dance rounds myself, and have had to politely reject several people who asked me to dance.
From the first I have tried to figure out just what it is about called couples dancing that I revile so, especially when squares --called set dancing-- is close to my favourite current type of dance. I think part of it is what I mentioned above, that I have spent so long watching creative and complex figures that the idea of subscribing to another's choice seems bland or cheap somehow. Part might also be the complexity of the figures involved. Often, especially with a clever caller, square dancing feels like a puzzle, where we tie a series of careful knots, and if you don't end up exactly where you belong, the whole thing can fall apart. Eight people (or twelve2, if you're dancing in a hex --more on that in another entry) solving a puzzle together is a lot of fun, especially when you're doing so in a rush of movement and grabbing hands. Two people logically have less complex maneuvers, and so the puzzle is less interesting --if it's even a puzzle at all.
Ultimately, I'm not sure I've solved what my beef is with round dancing. I'll keep thinking about it, and let you know if I draw any more useful conclusions. And who knows. Maybe my scientific nature will force me to try it before I decide for good that it's simply not for me.
1: Technically, my couple dancing experience dates back to when I was eight-nine-ten, and friends of the family hosted monthly balls at their place. I learned how to waltz (both the first and second time) by people who have been doing such for my lifetime and longer, and while most of the experience faded amongst the years when I was not dancing so regularly, I stubbornly maintain I have been doing Grand Marches since I was eight.
2: Or, as happens surprisingly frequently due to a friend and I dancing gemini --side by side with one of us being the left hand and one of us the right-- a thirteen person hex.
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