For an organizers' role, it seems best to follow what the dancers want, which is going to differ by the dance series. It could be the dancers you have, or the dancers you are trying to recruit, but it's very important to pay attention to what they like.
That said, here are some additional reasons why callers' choice may work out for an individual group. 4. It's better to let callers learn and execute their craft, in their own way, than to try and micro-manage them. If you have a good caller visiting town, are you going to turn them away unless they use the right terms, or are you going to put them in so long as they draw a crowd? The situation reminds me of what a lot of public school teachers go through. There are often more administrators than teachers in a public school district, and to have something to do, they are always and forever stifling the teachers with new rules and constraints each year. Learning new terms is much harder on the callers than the dancers; we should be careful that one of the most important resources of a contra dance group isn't stuffed into a situation they're not excited to be in. 5. Dancers value diversity. It wouldn't be a very fun dance series if there was a worked-out optimal sequence of dances, instructions, and songs, and every single dance was exactly the same as the others. It would be like if the movie theater showed the same movie every weekend. I feel like contra dance is just going a certain direction, but at the same time, it will always be fun for people to sometimes do things the old-fashioned way. 6. Dancers are different from each other. Variety among the callers will pull in a generally larger crowd, because people will come for the caller that changed their life, and stay for the ones that are merely pretty cool. 7. Dancers evolve, but slowly. Even assuming the new terms are here to stay and will increasingly catch on, it's kinder and is gentler for retention to let people dip their toe into the new terms gradually. 8. People like to role play something they aren't, and for that process to happen, the role has to actually be something. One of my most memorable experiences was two friends of mine sussing each other out as queer after one made a sheepish, coded comment about really enjoying the theater. What an interesting choice of code. They had this long talk late into the night, and I belatedly learned that I could have been a much better friend to the one of them if I'd listened better and had any idea what she was trying to tell me. If you are spending a lot of time processing identity--who you are, what categories you are in--it can be very healing to participate in theater and to role play as something else. When you cast Peter Pan with a female actor, you're not making the role of Peter Pan be non-gendered, and you're not making the actor commit to being male. There's an air of ambiguity, laughter, and FUN about that kind of situation that wouldn't be possible if Peter Pan were changed to Nebish Nongendered. The issue for traditional contra dance is not that Peter Pan is gendered, but that some people are bored or resentful about always being Peter Pan, every single time, for years on end. Lex Spoon
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