On 1/21/2013 6:27 PM, Aahz Maruch quoted me:
Even if you did only want to dance with your friends, that is your
perfect right. You have complete freedom to decline any offer you
don't want to accept for whatever reason and then accept an offer you
do want to accept. You are not required to offer an explanation.
(If you say no to Joe and then yes to Jerry and Joe's paying
attention, he'll get the message that you didn't want to dance with
him and his feelings may be hurt, but that's actually his business,
not yours. It would possibly be a kindness to Joe and to the
community to tell Joe "you twirl me too much" or "I don't like to do
dips" if there's some simple way he could alter his behavior that
would let you enjoy dancing with him, but it's not required, and just
saying "No, thank you" means you don't have to have a conversation and
can each try to find other partners. If you only ever dance with a
small subset of the people in the hall, other people will eventually
notice and have opinions - and that's still their business, not
yours.)
Not that I'm necessarily disagreeing with this, but how do you reconcile
what you're writing here with the meme that people "should" dance with
the newbies and the sidelined dancers?
Everyone who comes to a contra dance is trying to engage in
enjoyment-maximizing behavior. There are usually plenty of other things
they could be doing with their Saturday night, and this thing is what
they decided would be most fun. So beyond the very basic rules - you
kinda have to do the figures the caller called, and do them with whoever
you come to in line; that's the basic contract - anything else is optional.
I personally don't want anybody dancing with the newbies who is doing it
solely out of a sense of duty, rather than because they hope to enjoy it
or because they're taking a big-picture view and realize that the
activity needs to integrate the newbies in order to survive so that they
can keep enjoying it.
Erik Hoffman has a thing about the stages of a contra dancer, and the
mature contra dancer - in his view - has passed through the crazy
flourishes and hottest partner phase already and is now concerned with
the happiness of the room; can enjoy helping a beginner through a dance
as much as being in a hot set with a hot partner, etc. I like to think
that will happen, although I look around the Bay Area and see several
people who, it seems to me, are not mature dancers even though they've
been doing it for twenty years; guys and gals who book every dance,
often while in line for the previous dance, do dips; appear - and of
course I'm not in their heads so who knows what's actually going on - to
only partner with others they'd like to date, etc, etc. And while that
annoys me, it _is_ their perfect right. They paid their ten bucks; they
can try to have the kind of dance experience they want to have. We're
not going to toss them out for being uncommunitarian. And we need their
ten bucks. (Maybe not their individual ten bucks - we can afford to
bounce somebody for being creepy - but their collective ten bucks; if we
banned everybody who ever behaved selfishly from contra dances we'd have
a lot of trouble filling our dance halls.)
Also, what accounts for the prevalance of the meme that one "should
never" turn down an offer to dance? (I tend to fall into this camp and
I'm not really sure where I got it from.)
I was surprised recently to encounter the "If you decline an invitation
you must sit out that dance" meme in Jane Austen, although I've
forgotten where. I don't know if that's where it's coming from, though.
-- Alan
