All the Way Around

Lisa and I pulled into Charleston exactly on time to meet some of the Charleston dance community for dinner. The trouble was: we didn’t know who we were looking for. As we tried to explain what group we were a part of to the woman behind the counter, a man leaning on the bar asked, “contra dancers?” Lisa and I nodded, then followed him and a woman to the back of the restaurant where a table was already set up for us.

Paintings with many-eyed humans and beasts watched us as we talked and waited for the others to arrive. We learned that the man was a chemist who had retired the day before. He invited us to his retirement party, to be held directly after the dance.

Two thirds of the band arrived–the Kessinger brothers, who were the grandchildren of a great West Virginia bluegrass legend. They had been playing this music most of their lives, themselves. Often, when a band isn’t ready to play after the caller has finished the walk through, the caller has to tell jokes to entertain the crowd. That night, the food was late in arriving, and the band entertained us with jokes as we waited. “What’s the difference between a dead opossum on the side of the road and a dead bluegrass musician on the side of the road?” the fiddler asked us. “The dead opossum MIGHT have been on his way to a gig.”

We arrived at the dance hall, St. John’s Episcopal Church, just as the bells were chiming 8 O’clock–on time once again! However, the set up went slowly and the dance didn’t get underway until several minutes later. I stepped outside to stretch my legs, and a woman outside asked me what contra dancing was. I explained it to her, and tried to get her inside to try it for herself, but my description didn’t entice her. It’s something I need to work on.

Steve Ballman, the caller, told everyone to line up. Lisa and I walked to the center of the hall, but no one got behind us. “The top of the hall is over by that wall, under the hanging quilt,” someone told us. We lined up with everyone else in a sideways set across the hall.

The wide stage was a dominating presence in the room. The band stood on top of it, between red curtains while the caller and sound person stood just in front of the stage. At the head of the contra set was a green quilt hanging from the wall; at its foot were tall windows. A table holding cookies, pretzels, and drinks was in the corner of the room.

“The dance begins with a neighbor balance and swing,” said Steve Ballman. “Then,” he continued in a wry voice, “you’ve got to explain to your partner what was going on there with your neighbor. Make it up to him or her with a swing.”

A couple of dances later was a circle dance. One figure in the dance had the gents on the outside of the circle, face-to-face and holding hands with their partners, who were facing out. The gents pushed the ladies into the center. “The ladies get their revenge and push outwards,” Steve explained. “But the gents push the ladies in once more, and the ladies push them out one more time.” This move was followed by a do-si-do and swing. “Tell your partner ’sorry about the push’, then move on to the next.”

Lisa and I were told by several people that attendance was low that night. Some speculated that this was because the dance was the last of the season. “It’s hard to get people to dance in the summer because they want to go off and do other things,” one dancer told me. The Charleston dance does not occur in the summer months.

There were some beginners, but most of the people there were experienced dancers. An older woman brought her friend to dance for her first time, and after a few times on the floor, the friend told me she was having a great time.

Just before the break, I chatted with my partner as we waited out at the top of the set. As new neighbors came to meet us, we were caught by surprise. I’m not sure if we didn’t circle or star far enough, but when the dust settled, we each had new partners. We never quite figured out a way to fix the situation, so we continued the dance with these others. “You should have seen your face when you realized what happened!” my original partner told me. We decided to do the first contra after the break.

Numbers dwindled as the dance went on, and by the final contra, we were dancing in a vertical set. The dance ended, but those remaining begged the Steve for one more contra. He obliged, and called another.

After the waltz, everyone there helped put the room back the way it was. Tables were set up and chairs stacked on top of them. The remaining snacks were hastily eaten or put away as a woman swept the floor.

Lisa and I were very tired, but we decided to check out our dinner companion’s retirement party. We followed him back to his place through some of the curviest roads Lisa or I had seen on this trip. The whole time, John Denver’s “Country Roads” played in my head. Late into the night, contra dancers snacked and socialized. We talked of public education and literature, and of the contra dancing we all had done. “Did you all know each other before contra dancing?” I asked them, just as we were about to leave with our hosts. They all replied that it was contra dancing that brought them together.

-South Charleston, WV

Blizzards and rain storms harassed Lisa and I nearly the duration of the time we spent driving through the state of Wyoming. One theory I had for this was that though we wound up spending 3 days traveling through the state, we did not dance within its borders. In our defense, Wyoming had no contra dancing we could find. An internet search for “Wyoming contra dance” returned only a dance in “the Wyoming Fine Arts Center” in Ohio. However, 4 weeks later, a change in our route as we approached the area brought us to that very dance, and we attended in the hopes of appeasing the angry contra gods of Wyoming.

The Wyoming Fine Arts Center was an impressive building. Large and orange-pink, it was once a Masonic hall. The dance space inside was large, and reminded me of a pre-school I had attended in Keene, NH, which had also once been a Masonic hall. The stage was high, and large windows let in lots of light as the dance began. The floor was in good shape, smooth and shiny, and one of the organizers put a powder over half of it before the dance began.

To the left of the entrance were baskets of used name tags. Thinking I would easily find a “Dave” tag, I rummaged through the basket marked “A - F”. Though I found no less than 3 marked “Barry”, the closest I could find to my own name was “David.” Lisa fared even worse, and had to make a new tag for herself.

Lisa and I danced the first dance together. Two lines had formed, and we found ourselves on the powdery side of the floor. The music began and we swung our neighbors. I realized that the powder was there to make the floor more slick. My neighbor easily twirled under my arm without much friction from the floor. During the hey later in the dance, I half-stepped, half-glided between the rest of our group of 4.

The floor powder made the footwork smooth, but the swings themselves had an easiness to them, too. There were not many outright beginners in the hall, but several dancers claimed that they had been to only two or three dances before. Regardless of how much experience each person said they had, almost everyone I came into contact with had a very smooth swing.

I danced the next dance with a woman in a beautiful white dress. As we got going, I was very impressed by her presence and ability to give weight, so I tried a few twirls and other embellishments. An excellent follower, she picked up on each right away. We had a great time together, and when the dance was over, she pointed out her middle-school aged daughter. “Please dance with my daughter,” she said. “She’s so much fun!”

The next dance, I was dancing with the daughter, and saw instantly that she was a much better dancer than most her age. “How long have you been dancing?” I asked her, but she told me that she had been doing it for as long as she could remember. Our dance together had a petronella twirl followed by a partner balance and swing. We both smiled each time we spun into one another for our balance.

It was easy to see that this dance had an excellent sense of community. Several dancers I questioned told me they had been coming to this dance for years. The teaching in the lines was gentle and never pushy, and most people made very good eye contact–some of the best of the trip, Lisa and I agreed.

In addition to being a good community, the dancers were very friendly. As we entered the hall, a woman came up to us instantly and asked if we knew how to contra and offered to show us how. Several others asked where we were from. Even before the dance, the people Lisa and I passed on the street greeted us with friendly hellos.

The caller, Bernadene Zennie, did mostly improper and becket dances with one dance that was 4 facing 4. I liked her clean calling and well-paced walk throughs. She kept a good rhythm going throughout the night. There were almost always two good-sized sets, and she managed to keep them even, making plenty of room for everyone.

The music was great all night, and ended on a high note. During the final contra of the evening, which included contra corners, the band, Erin Ways, played one of my favorite tunes called “The Fisher’s Hornpipe.” Before leaving for this trip, my piano teacher was working with me to accompany this tune. It was a real blast to hear it all the way in Ohio.

The waltz they played was even better, a bouncy tune that Lisa and I had come across before. We bolted around the room together, inserting a “stomp-stomp” at the end of a musical phrase. The music guided us into familiar pivots and turns until at last the band reach its final note.

We followed our host home and talked with her and about our travels. We learned that she did quite a bit of traveling herself, having once worked for an airline. “When I felt like it and I had the free miles, I would take my daughter out to dinner in Baltimore or California,” she told us. “I’ve been to dances all over, too,” she continued, and we compared notes over strawberry shortcake until we were too exhausted to continue.

-Cincinnati, OH

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