Words that I have excised from my vocabulary that could now theoretically creep back in:

In Candidate Class, one of the things that is tested for your Unit 2 is your ability to brief the dances before performing them. However, these briefs must be manual-perfect, which means there's quite a few SCD colloquialisms that have dropped from my vocabulary lately, lest I become too comfortable with them and forget myself during the exam.

(As an aside, I actually had an interesting discussion with Jeanetta McColl about this, due to my originally putting "widdershins" into my exam lesson plan. Her reasoning, which is very sound, is that due to the truly international nature of Scottish Country Dancing, having standardized language that is used and shared by everyone across the world is much easier than hoping people will understand your alternate terminology.)

The classic example is "Hello-Goodbye Setting", which in official parlance is better known as "Set to Corners and Partner¹", but even something as mundane as "corner-partner-corner-partner" has a more official briefing as "turn corners and partner". There's a lovely woman who runs the Salem class who you can make scream if you call right hands across at the top and bottom "teapots", and quite a lot of contra dancers who will understand what you mean perfectly well if you call them "stars", but neither term is remotely correct. And of course, we never do a double anything, we do the thing twice.

(Which is honestly the biggest shame --the rest of that is fiddly, but "double crossover mirror reels" is dead simple to say, and evocative in a way "1s dance reels first with opposite sides then with own sides, crossing down between the 2s and 3s to begin" just isn't.)

Of course, all eyes are going to be on me² for the next few years as I find my footing as a teacher and start my unit 4 portfolio³, so we'll see whether I can actually loosen up my tongue. And who knows? If I'm ever calling a dance in South Africa, I'll be quite glad I've the experience of being able to brief something everyone would understand.

---

1: Not set to corners and partnerS, as I continually flubbed. There's definitely a polyamory joke in here somewhere...

2: Not actually true, I don't think, but our tutors liked to emphasize the fact that as new teachers, everyone would be looking to us as role models.

3: Assuming I passed my units 2 and 3, oh gods, the waiting!

What I've Learned This Summer

This summer has been the summer of new dancing, something I can't complain about in the slightest.

In Square Dancing, I have begun to learn the Advanced level¹. We just finished A1 last week, and presumably in a couple weeks will start A2. Huzzah for us! There are new difficult calls, and some really really interesting concepts that I don't get to enjoy in the regular Tech Squares group, which runs strictly mainstream/plus.

The most useful of these is the "As couples" signifier, which the caller can use to preface any call which is normally done in groups of four or fewer². The dancers will then perform the call as though each couple were a single person dancing --no problem at all for someone who's spent a lot of time dancing gemini³, and is used to being half a dancer, and a lot of fun as people pivot around each other frantically.

And in Scottish Country Dancing, I spent a week at a delightful dance camp called Pinewoods, where I had four classes in Highland step dancing. Highland is a performance dance, the first kind I've learned (discounting the ballet classes I took when I was six and seven), and involves bouncing. LOTS of bouncing, with very precise footwork, and intricate flailing of the arms.

I'm sure there must be a proper Highland class somewhere in the Boston area, I just need to find the beast, and see if there is time in my tight schedule to participate. I'm already dancing three nights a week, every week, and I'm hopefully about to get a job in the real world, and lose a bunch of time there.

At any rate, it's nice to be back to the beginning level, sometimes. While I love the joy of dancing and knowing just how to go, there is a particularly delicious challenge to learning new things --and a particularly satisfying smugness when you get them right. Perhaps I'll have to keep my eyes peeled for more opportunities to broaden my dance repertoire. You know. In my copious amounts of free time.

1: MWSD levels run thusly: Mainstream; Plus; Advanced: A1, A2; Challenge: C1, C2, C3

2: I assume. Someone can feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

3: Gemini is when two people stand tight together, each with their outside arm available, and behave as one dancer --the left person being the left hand, and the right person being the right hand. I really need to create a glossary. And/or a post talking specifically about this.

Beaus and Belles

It's always disconcerting to hear that you've been using terminology incorrectly.

Especially when the terminology references role in a form of dance you enjoy, and you write passionately on the subject of dance and role and gender on a regular basis. Then it's both disconcerting and a little embarrassing, and means you have to go off and revise your opinion of certain terms.

To wit, I have been using the Modern Western Square Dancing terms "beau" and "belle" incorrectly for almost a year now, a fact which only came to my attention now that I'm learning the A1 level, and there are calls where the correct definition becomes relevant. See, when I first heard the terms, it was as "beau is the person on the left (typically male), and belle is the person on the right (typically female)". I assumed that they were referring to the roles --whether you had the left role or the right role.

I was wrong. The terms beau and belle specifically mean person standing on the left at that moment, and person standing on the right at that moment. Meaning if you have a gender typical couple, who then sashays (switches positions), the woman will be the beau, and the man the belle.

I've spent a little bit of time thinking about it since then, and I've come to decide that this is actually totally brilliant and acceptable, especially if you dance in a group as devoted to queer dancing as Tech Squares. It's a little frustrating to have one more thing to keep track of --in a square dance, you need to know whether you are a boy or girl¹, whether you are a head or a side, and now whether you are a beau or a belle-- but it opens up opportunity for more complicated strings of calls, as it simplifies the calling from "person on the left, do this" to "beaus do this".

Also, looking back to my previous entry (four months ago in April, gak!), it seems like Pi-nerd has already explained this to me, and I just completely put it out of my head. Oh well. Now that it's something I have to worry about, it'll be easier to learn the concept. I would love to see it called more often in the Tech Squares mainstream/plus group though, both to give everybody more practise in keeping track of what identity the are right this instance, and because I think the terminology is elegant.

1: Starting-beau or starting-belle? It's not completely gender-free, and god is it clunky, but it's at least trying.

Vocabulary and Roles

Couples dancing is easy to degender. All you have to do is stop calling them the gentleman and the lady, and start calling them the lead and the follow. I've seen plenty of heteronormative dance halls do this already, because they're simply more descriptive titles anyways --it's pretty clear from names alone what the "lead" and "follow" do in a dance.

Then it comes time to describe the roles in a set dance, and my tongue stumbles. Lead and follow are no longer accurate descriptions, because most of the time, neither person is doing anything of the sort. Relabeling the gents as leaders simply starts to reinforce the leader/male, follow/female dichotomy that I'm specifically trying to avoid. And so the problem remains: In a set dance, you are one of two roles. How do we label these roles?

The words I've been using are "lady" and "gent", for lack of anything more recognizable¹. Most of the set dance forms I do label them along similar lines. The least gendered role names come from ModernWesternSquaresDancing, where the technical terms are "Beau"(gent) and "Belle"(lady). Still gendered, albeit in a more archaic fashion, and unfortunately unused --I almost exclusively hear the words boys, girls, men, or ladies when calling one role to do something specific.

Riffing on my footnote below, I suppose a movement could be started to refer to the people on the left as the Lefts, and the people on the right as the Rights. Two things make me hesitant however --first that both words are called often to refer to hands or directions and second that a good number of dancers seem already unclear on the difference between left and right, especially when presented quickly. Saying "first Left turn the second Right by the right then turn the third Right by the left" is a technically accurate instruction for Scottish Dancing, but it becomes a parsing nightmare as the dancers try to work out what hands and people were indicated above.

I could, of course, use the above when writing here, and it wouldn't be problematic at all --I'm only rarely giving instructions to dances in this blog, after all. However, just finding good words for me to use is only a small part of my problem. I really just want something that can be universally used across dance forms and halls to indicate who's who, without attaching gender to the role.

I suppose the best current solution exists in some of the gender-free contra halls I've been a part of, where the dancers are divided into "Bands" (or "Beads") and "Bares". The people on the left are given bright ribbon to wear as armbands, or mardi gras beads, clearly marking them different from those with bare arms or necks. This is certainly the most well implemented solution, in that not only do the dancers understand who is who, but the caller is able to actually call moves one role or the other, without having to use gendered terms. Unfortunately, the practise seems limited to the contra communities, which make the words less appropriate to use universally. Not because I don't think the terms are excellent, but again, because they wouldn't be recognizable except to that particular crowd.

The conclusion of this post is that, unfortunately, I don't _have_ a conclusion. If there *are* easily recognizable names for the two roles in most set dances, I haven't heard them yet. The choice is two-fold, currently: either attempt to degender the terms Lady and Gent, at least when regarding dance roles, or attempt to bring new vocabulary into dance forms that may very well not see any need for it at all.

Seriously though, this is why I ask my partner what role they want to dance. Because then the onus of choosing a name for the role falls to them, instead.

1: Recognizability is _key_. I could easily declare that the people on the left of the hall when facing the music are the "glucks" and the people on the right are the "shoobs", but unless I'm willing to preface every following post with an explanation, the words are essentially meaningless.