Old-Time Music and Dance: Community and Folk Revival

11. Gardening and Dumpstering

— 105 — 11 GARDENING AND DUMPSTERING The moral community of the dance was not wholly constituted in narrative , of course. The discrete events recounted in stories were indeed connected, albeit loosely, by a unifying orientation toward real-life choices. It was not so explicit as an ideology nor so rigid as a lifestyle— this is probably why narrative, rather than doctrine, was so important in its operation. Around 1980, for example, the dance began printing Tshirts for its two annual dance weekends. Other than phrases like “oldtime music and dance” and pastoral scenes depicting dancers and musicians , never was there inscribed any epithet suggesting group doctrine. At that time and place, it would have been considered in poor taste even to have proclaimed, “I love contra dance.” Again, T-shirts were a code of awareness, not an announcement of affiliation. Some would say this was because no doctrine existed, and in a way this was true. Merely to participate in the dance, however, demanded from most an abrupt shift of consciousness regarding, for example, the deportment of the body, the meaning of work, the way group decisions were made, or the relative value of time and commodities. Thus, in the absence of explicit doctrine, much that swelled to fill the symbolic void had a striking, if serendipitous, similarity. — 106 — Old-Time Music and Dance For example, modernist conceptions of work and leisure posited them as stark antitheses in the mainstream, each counteracting negative qualities of the other. The dance, drawn from traditional models, was not recreation at all but an important community event. One attended not to “let off steam” or relax, but to see friends, to catch up on news, to see who was there, or even to fulfill a vague sense of obligation. There were always some who just dropped by to visit or came to stay but not dance; even someone prevented by injury from dancing might well not want to miss the dance. If former dancers had relocated to another city and returned to Bloomington for a visit, they would be expected to drop by and would likely find themselves the center of attention. If a new dancer seemed to know already how to dance, there was a buzz of excitement and curiosity. This was the way the dance felt, built on the social fabric of community. These effects were only intensified by the unrelenting cyclical pattern of dance events. As far as could be remembered, the dance was held every Wednesday. Even in years when Christmas and New Year’s Day fell on Wednesday, enough dancers could be found to keep the dance going. By the end of the 1970s, the Bloomington dance had accumulated its own stock of important calendar celebrations, and these were rapidly supplemented by annual events that Bloomington dancers attended in other nearby cities. In Bloomington, dancers could look forward in January to the Bean King Party, in February to Ted Hall’s birthday, in April to Swing into Spring, in May to May Day, and in August to Sugar Hill dance weekend. In most cases (and much unlike celebratory events that evolved in other dance communities), these local annual celebrations were less rigidly structured—providing for more informal socializing—than the Wednesday Night Dance itself. Some of these were genuine calendar celebrations, standing as the communal experience of seasonal transition. These transitions might be seasonal climate changes or community responses to societal shifts, such as workload fluctuations or the public school calendar. Sugar Hill, in fact, could rent scout camps because the date fell between the summer camping season and the fall campout season, at precisely the time scouting families were taking vacations. Taken together, these weekly and annual events constituted a comprehensive appropriation of the secular — 107 — Gardening and Dumpstering calendar and its rhythms. At times, the pace could be so rigorous and demanding that it affected dancers’ physical rhythms such as sleep patterns . It entirely refocused social energies, lending momentum to the constellation of alternative values that circulated in the dance. The unifying theme of these values was never more specific than a conspiracy among dancers to arrange their lives so as to accommodate the most music and dance. If an employer was inflexible with a dancer’s work schedule and would not accommodate an important weekend trip, the group was quick to share the dancer’s indignation. But beyond this there...