Bree, I’m making the same change as well and am calling without reference to role and don’t need bird terms. Louise Siddons’ position is a compelling one.
Peg Hesley www.peghesley.com Sent from my iPhone using voice recognition On Feb 8, 2023, at 7:04 PM, Bree Kalb via Contra Callers <contracallers@lists.sharedweight.net> wrote:
I made the same changes Chrissy did and for the same reason. I think it was 4-5 years ago when I switched from M and W to Gents and Ladies. And it seems to me that almost all the local callers did the same.
( Now I’m calling without reference to gender or role. Louise Siddons booklet “Dance the Whole Dance” from CDSS describes well what many of us are learning to do.)
If it matters, my dance community is in a progressive/liberal area, so calling styles here might be different than in other places.
Bree Kalb Carrboro, NC At the Ralph Page Legacy day last month, Chrissy Fowler did a session in which she called dances as she called them at different times in her career. In it, she talked about how, at one point, she and other female callers were insisting on the term "women" because they weren't ladies, and then several years later they were insisting on the term "ladies" because that was understood to be the name of a role.
I can't give a year when it happened, but I do believe I remember a time when at least some callers were making it explicitly clear that the terms Gents and Ladies referred to roles, and anybody could dance either role.
I believe it’s in Myrtle Wilhite’s Lullaby of the Swing and other contra dances, tunes, waltzes, and essays (Madison, WI, 1993). I can’t lay my hand on my copy at the moment, but perhaps someone else has one.
Tony Parkes
Billerica, Mass.
www.hands4.com
New book! Square Dance Calling: An Old Art for a New Century
(available now)
Jeff, me too...if you find it, share please.
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who couldn't hear the music." - Nietzsche
“Life is not about waiting for the storms to pass ... it's about learning to dance in the rain!” ~ unknown
Aside: does anyone have a copy of the "I am not a lady" essay? I'd be interested to read it.
Joe Harrington wrote:
>
When I started dancing in the late 1980s… Callers were taking the revolutionary step of not calling "men" and "women" but rather using "ladies" and "gents", to signal that switching roles was ok, since nobody referred to themselves as a "lady" or a "gent"
in casual conversation.
Where was this, Joe? And are you talking about contra callers (rather than ECD)? I can only speak about the NYC area in the 1960s and early ’70s, and New England starting in the
late ’60s and continuing to the present. In both regions, square/contra callers (contras were a subcategory of square dance until around 1975) universally used “gents/ladies.” (I believe ECD teachers have always used “men/women,” presumably emulating Playford
and Cecil Sharp.) AFAIK, northeastern callers pretty consistently used “gents/ladies” until some of them started to move away from gender-related terms. Tolman and Page’s
Country Dance Book (1937) uses “gents/ladies,” as do most of the other standard American dance books from the 1900s to the 1950s (a few, aimed at schoolteachers, use “boys/girls”).
I know of no region where callers changed from “men/women” to “gents/ladies.” I know that some callers, beginning I think in the ’80s, changed from “gents/ladies” to “men/women,”
feeling that “gentlemen” and “ladies” smacked of classism. (One female caller, in an essay titled “I am not a lady,” requested that other callers not use her contra compositions if they adhered to “gents/ladies.”) As an amateur (= lover) of dance history,
I would like to know about past changes of which I was unaware.
Tony Parkes
Billerica, Mass.
www.hands4.com
New book! Square Dance Calling: An Old Art for a New Century
(available now)
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