City Folk: English Country Dance and the Politics of the Folk in Modern America

Preface

| ix Preface Folk dance groups seemingly are in an ever-constant search for new bodies, especially to augment the persistent short supply of male dancers. In that spirit, in March 1993, some friends with whom I was doing Scandinavian dancing every Wednesday evening at a synagogue on East 14th Street in New York City urged me to join them at a Tuesday-evening session of English Country Dancing at the Metropolitan-Duane Methodist Episcopal Church on 13th Street and Seventh Avenue. I had a full day of teaching on Tuesdays, so I thought I would be ready for some relaxation. And the church was very convenient; I lived only a few blocks away. Other than one or two dances, which had entered the International Folk Dance repertoire, I had never done any English dancing. Still, I suspected that I would enjoy the form. The previous year, while spending a year teaching in Baltimore, I had come to enjoy a kindred dance form: contra dance. Dancing in numerous folk dance venues was not unusual. As was my custom, wherever I happened to be I joined the local International dance group. In Baltimore, it met weekly at Johns Hopkins University. That spring I also danced with the local Balkan dance performance troupe, Narod. Balkan dance is performed with lines of men and women; sometimes they dance together, sometimes separately. Groups of each are needed, but not necessarily in even numbers. Country dancing, however, is couple dancing (as is Scandinavian), and near the end of my year in Baltimore the women of Narod convinced me to join them at Lovely Lane Church for an evening of contra dancing. I remember that first venture as exhilarating and intimidating. The musicians —typically a fiddler, a banjo picker, a guitarist, and a piano player— rocked. The music seemed like familiar country square dance music, and the caller zipped through instructions that bore some resemblance to grade-school “do-si-dos” and “left and rights,” but the women spun and “twizzled,” ad-libbing extra turns and lunges that dazzled me. I dare say I did not leave anyone dazzled the few weeks I danced there, but I did find I loved the music and the dancing. x | Preface Back in New York the next year, in the wake of the putative end of the Cold War, the tumultuous breakup of the Soviet Union after 1989, and the consequent resurgence of nationalism, I found the International dance community had become a small uptown dance group focusing on Balkan dance, a relatively difficult, vigorous dance tradition of line dances in often complicated , quick patterns.1 The location was inconvenient, but I think in retrospect I also did not appreciate that the group seemed to have become more antiquarian and nationalist than internationalist. My turn away from Balkan dance reflects my interest in the politics of the folk, an interest deeply rooted in my personal history. I have folk danced since I was a young boy. I was introduced to folk dance through my parents and at “red diaper” summer camps in the early 1950s. These were “International ” folk dances, dances from many lands that we danced as an expression of international solidarity with “common folk.” As such, I grew up feeling the dances were integral to Left political culture and important on a personal and familial level to what I experienced, in the age of Reagan, as an increasingly beleaguered Left political community. The decline and narrowing of the International dance community in New York in the early 1990s, then, coincided with my decision to try English Country Dance (ECD). Changes in folk dance practice and the dance community have variously bemused and agitated me as a participant-observer. Growing up in a leftwing family and in the folk culture of the 1950s and 1960s—a period that I analyze in the second half of this book—I experienced folk song and dance as part of a vital political culture. I enjoyed folk dancing as part of a Left community that walked picket lines together in the afternoon and sang folk songs “of protest” while doing so. Moreover, when I danced the “Danish Masquerade,” I for the moment left the world of affluence and political instability and became the peasant, gentry, or aristocracy that the three parts of the dance aped. Similarly, when I joined a circle that was dancing a Croatian “Kolo Dance” to celebrate a wedding, I joined the men in teasing the women, once again imagining...