All the Way Around

The drive from Ann Arbor to Webster was a beautiful one. “This is the first dance we’ve been to outside a city in months,” I remarked to Dave. The drive reminded me of the ones we had to dance halls in rural Virginia and North Carolina near the beginning of the trip.

The downstairs of the Webster Community Center had a large sitting room, where we would later chat and snack during the break. The contra dance was held upstairs in a room that had the feel of an attic, with a low ceiling that sloped on either side. Small windows bordered the dance floor and in a corner nook, the band was set up on a small platform.

“Line up for a long ways,” announced the caller, Don Theyken, and Dave and I joined a set for the first contra of the night. We immediately realized that for the first time since we left the Northeast, the courtesy turns were back to the way we were used to performing them, with right hands joined behind the lady’s back.

As dancers found new partners the caller said, “Next we’re going to do a Sicilian circle dance… in a line.” The dance was fun and contained a move that was new to both Dave and I—the “Georgia Rang Tang.” The figure was a sort of right and left grand for four, but the pull-bys alternated with a hooked elbow turn, which allowed everyone to change directions.

The band that night had an amazing and unique sound that made it hard to sit out. There were four musicians: two fiddlers, a keyboardist, and a guitar player, and they were called the Sharon Hill String Band. Their tunes ranged from bluesy, with harmonica accompaniment, to jazzy, with the guitarist singing along: “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing doo-wat di-wat doo-wat doo-wat.”

During the break, another caller asked if people would volunteer to run through a contra that he wrote and me and Dave joined in. His new dance was called “Trillium Delirium” and he wrote it in honor of Trillium Twirl, a Michigan contra dance festival. He called the dance first thing after the break, along with another that he wrote, before the original caller for the night took over again.

We heard many comments about how low the attendance was that night. One dancer told me that he thought it was because that night was the last contra dance of the season—the Ann Arbor contra dancers stop dancing in the hot, summer months. Another dancer told me that they thought attendance was low because that night’s dance was located in the smaller and more remote dance hall of the two that they used for contra dancing.

The sets that night were filled with an older crowd of dancers with a fun, traditional style of dancing. Also, there were more men present than women, giving the dance an uncommon dynamic. A few men chose to dance the part of the follower instead of sitting out, including Dave. One man took his bandanna from around his neck and wore it on his head like a bonnet, to show dancers that he was dancing the part of the follower.

I sat out during a dance towards the end, and chatted with a man who told me a little bit of the area’s contra dance history. He said that Henry Ford was responsible for bringing a contra dance resurgence to Michigan. In the 1920s he purchased a sprung-floor dance hall in Detroit where he could teach country dancing to his friends and made it a requirement for the workers in his factories, as well. The dancer added that this was not entirely altruistic, and was meant among other things to Americanize Ford’s immigrant workers. They were to learn the American folk dance and forget the dances of their own countries.

We were visiting friends of Dave’s family during our stay in Michigan and they joined us for the dance that night. Former contra dancers, they had begun dancing when they were our age in our home dance of Nelson, NH. It didn’t take them long to remember all the figures, and we were glad to see that they were enjoying contra dancing once again.

-Chelsea, MI

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 13th, 2007 at 3:51 pm and is filed under 25 Michigan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.