Old-Time Music and Dance: Community and Folk Revival

20. Dare to Be Square

— 189 — 20 DARE TOBE SQUARE In addition to his involvement with the sunrise May Day celebration, Paul Tyler was also an experienced caller of southern squares and perhaps the first in the group to embrace squares deliberately as an alternative to contras. It was not that Bloomington had any antipathy to squares—which had, after all, been Barry Kern’s trademark as a caller— but the group seemed to have settled into a set of stock preferences that Paul challenged. Somehow, the issue of how many of each to do had not arisen. For all their similarities—both are essentially figure dances or set dances, describing mostly floor pattern movement of dancers arranged in sets—contras and squares are fundamentally different dances. Squares require a fixed number of dancers (usually eight) in a set. So dancing a square necessitates enumeration, most noticeably when dancers in the last unfilled set must coerce reluctant dancers to join or give up and sit out unwillingly. Couples in a contra set or line—“as many as will,” so goes the saying—join at the bottom end until the line is full, and then start another line. Contra sets are usually large—the length of the room—so that many dancers interact. In a square one normally interacts only with the three other couples in the set, suggesting a closed — 190 — Old-Time Music and Dance community with fixed neighbors and codes of conduct. According to many contemporary dancers who have tried both, the social perception of each of the two is profoundly different. When Mary Dart asked dance leaders nationwide why dancers preferred contras over squares, predictably, these structural features were given as the reasons (1995: 179). Still, however tempting this functional reasoning might be, it is important to note that it was the particular vision of community—egalitarian openness—that prevailed in these dance groups that made the effortless inclusiveness of the contra so attractive. One could use the same logic in favor of the square if the preference was for sustained, repetitive encounters. It is also worth noting that the Southern Appalachian “big set” incorporates most of the same attractive features as contras and has long been accessible to dancers in dance camp instructional programs. Yet it is practically nonexistent in revival community dances and has never been promoted as a more fulfilling synthesis of the two forms (see Jamison 1993). Contras were also notoriously easy to learn, choreograph, and notate at a time of widespread expansion of dance communities. An experienced dancer, for example, could easily jot down the figures of a contra as it ended, finishing in time to get a partner for the next dance. An ambitious caller could throw together some new combination of contra figures, give it some sentimental name, and call it a “composition.” Widely varying results in composing gave rise to an increasingly acute aesthetic consciousness, rapidly adapting the contra form to the socialinteractional tastes of the new communities. Experienced callers and dancers consistently referred Mary Dart to the “story line” or “social plot” of a contra, reflecting awareness of complex social and physical relationships associated with roles, figures, and transitions between figures (1995: 108–10). With this acute sensitivity, contra choreography over the 1970s and 1980s was designed around the desire to extend dancer interactions beyond traditional limits (even in complex ways such as by involving more than the minor set of two couples) and also to provide, overall, a “balance of opposite sex and same sex, one-to-one, and group interactions” (106). Composing was a novelty at first: when Dillon Bustin wrote “Anne’s a Bride Tonight,” it was a rare event to compose a new dance. But in — 191 — Dare to Be Square 1983, the publication of Larry Jennings’s encyclopedic Zesty Contras, with many of its 500 dances newly composed, opened the door for many to write their own dances. By the mid-1980s, new compositions predominated at dance events, and good composers were becoming known as celebrities. Ironically, one of the first to complain was Ted Sannella, who during the 1980s introduced his dance composition workshops with the question, “Why compose new contras?” “Philosophically,” he once phrased it, “I feel there are enough dances out there; we really don’t need new dances because there’s a wealth of material” (Sannella 1986: 28). The barrage of new compositions might have led to stratification...