On Fri, Jan 27, 2017 at 11:40 AM, Ron Blechner via Callers <[email protected]> wrote: > To answer your question, though, about how many dancers want genderfree > terms, at least ten dances are genderfree, and I bet we can poll those > dances and find out how many active dancers they have. While the Western > Mass one by me is a little low, dances like Brooklyn, Portland Maine, and > Montpelier second Saturday boast very large crowds, and that's just ones > I've personally attended. There's queer dance camps, too. Clearly there's a > demand. I realize "huge" is a relative number, but we can safely agree on > several thousand dancers as a safe low estimate of dancers who want gender > free roles.
You're classifying everyone who attends a dance with gender-free calling as having wanting it to be gender free, but I'm sure some are attending in spite of it being gender free, and many more don't care either way. > These genderfree dances exist, some for 39 years, they've grown tremendously > in the last 5 years *while many traditional dances are losing attendance*. That's not what it looks like to me. The particular dances that have been gender free for a long time are mostly doing fine, but it doesn't look to me like they're growing tremendously. Instead, newer fast-growing dances are either started as gender free or are switching to it. I don't think the causality goes the way you're suggesting. > This isn't some existential threat to non-genderfree > traditional dances. Let us talk. Some pushback seems reasonable to me. Just like I think people should be able to dance either role at any contra dance, I think all contra dances should move to being gender free. Not immediately -- it's fine to take some more time to consense on terms, have some brave dances try them out, have callers get used to calling them -- but I do think moving entirely to gender free terms is what we should be doing as a community. Jeff
