New Hampshire Old-Time Country Dance Web Site

Introduction

The series of articles underlying this page was originally inspired by the 1995 Ralph Page Legacy Weekend in Durham NH and by the journal Contra and Square Dance History published by Michael McKernon quarterly during 1995 and 1996.

I’ve been thinking about some of the changes in New England traditional dance over they years, and trying to fit together various observations and bits of knowledge and speculation I’ve encountered over the years.

Before getting any further into this topic, I need to establish several points. The first few deal with my approach to the topic.

• This is a topic that’s been studied at length by folklorists, ethnomusicologists and historians. I am none of those. I am a behavioral psychologist by profession, who has participated in New England Country Dance for the majority of my life in all the major roles: dancer, musician and dance caller.
• As such I think I have some worthwhile observations and insights on the matter. However I also recognize the dangers of trying to discuss a topic in a field outside one’s area of expertise.
• To avoid that, I will present a number of observations, and my interpretations will make use of concepts from behavioral psychology and related evolutionary concepts which I believe are useful in this context.

Contradancing is a living tradition and changes over time

Having said that, here are some broad observations about New England country dance.

• Contradancing is a living tradition. It goes back in its roots several hundred years, and it’s still being done. As with any living tradition it changes to fit the needs of the current musicians and dancers.
• This is a good thing: if it stopped adapting it would probably become a period performance art rather than something that we did just for fun.
• That doesn’t mean that all changes are good, or that everyone has to like the way things are going.
• In the past couple decades [from 2019] it seems like the overall pace of change has accelerated markedly; I’m not sure this is a good thing in the world of traditional music and dance, but we have to make the best of it we can.
• We can try to direct the changes, but my feeling is that it’s very difficult to change trends that often reflect changes in the society and culture at large.

But parts of the tradition are passed on with little change

From September 1992 to February 2019 the Lamprey River Band played a monthly dance in the Dover City Hall. Nearly every time we did a dance I would spend at least a few minutes looking out at the dancers and thinking about how many years earlier, in the 1940s and 1950s, there were also monthly dances in that hall. They were called by people like Phil Johnson, Mal Hayden, Ralph Page and Guy Mann. I knew Phil for years and met Guy Mann’s wife after he died; she came to the dance to see if I wanted any of his square dance materials, and we picked them up at their apartment in Dover. The musicians for the dance included Marcel Robidas, Milt Appleby and Joe Pomerleau, all friends I’ve played music with many times, and others I heard about from them. The dancers I’m less sure about, but I believe Paul Kanaly used to dance there and maybe others.

I would think about how they did many of the same dances we do now, often to the same tunes we use for them today, and called by some of the people who were my role models for learning to call. Suddenly history isn’t something you read about in a book; I was experiencing and participating in history myself!

The Dover dance isn’t happening any more, but we’re doing the dance in the Durham Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. When I first started dancing in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Dudley Laufman did a monthly dance there which I attended. So it was pretty amazing when Dudley showed up and called a couple dances at our first dance in the hall. And now I think about how I call some of the same dances there that Dudley called 40 years ago, again often to the same tunes. The big difference is that I was actually there, and remember him calling those dances that I am now calling in the same hall to the same tunes.

Although aspects of the dance may have changed

Think about some of the older dances you have danced. Some of them are clearly among the most fun dances around. In my opinion a list of such contras would include Chorus Jig, Hull’s Victory, Sackett’s Harbor, British Sorrow, Lady of the Lake, Money Musk, and actually quite a number of others. However, if you look through a book of dances from say 100 to 125 years ago [1995 reference], you’ll probably find many other dances that appear at best to be worth doing out of historical curiosity. And I say this as someone who overall is probably much more fond of the older dances than many. Even most of the older dances that are popular now once were done differently. Nearly all the old favorite dance were done in ways most modern dancers would consider less exciting.

In fact, sometimes I have wondered why dancing was ever all that popular given the obviously boring qualities of a number of older dances. If that’s what they did a hundred or two hundred years ago, it seems like they couldn’t have had that much fun. A look in dance books from a century ago produces a long list of plain quadrilles that, at least on paper, often seem rather uninspired. But yet, the kind of dancing we do was historically considerably more popular than it is now. In past years many more towns had their own dances, generally weekly rather than monthly. In the middle of rural New Hampshire, the Bradford dance attracted hundreds of dancers every weekend for decades.

One might attribute that to the slower pace of life, or to the dancers being less sophisticated. But consider the fact that contradancing appealed to people like George Washington, whose favorite dance was the Virginia Reel which is now considered boring by many dancers. No one could consider George Washington a simple rural person of simple taste who led a dull life.

In the next section I will present some concepts that may appear to be questionably relevant but I think say something about what’s going on.

Behavioral variability among dancers, musicians & callers …

In the previous section I showed a graph of the hypothetical quality of dances based on a large sample of available dances (top panel) I show a preponderance of mediocre dances and a smaller number of really good ones, which is probably accurate. Behavioral selection alone can account for the disappearance of most mediocre dances from the repertoire as described in the previous section (bottom panel). There are so many good ones that why dance the mediocre ones. You’ve likely experienced that yourself if you’ve been dancing for a while: new dances come along and are called a fair amount at first, but then gradually fade into obscurity.

But things are more complicated than that. In reading an article in Michael McKernan’s journal, some ideas I’ve had for a while started to solidify. As any dancer should be able to understand, the dance as written is really only the basic framework of the dance as actually danced. There are at least three aspects to this, each of which is subject to considerable variability.

Let's start with the music. The written music for most dance tunes is only a framework around which musicians, each with an individual style, build variations and harmonies to fill it out. Compare a dance tune played by a good fiddler who knows the tradition well with the same tune played by someone who is unfamiliar with the tune and the tradition and is reading the music out of a book. Even if the person has excellent reading skills the difference will be obvious. How the tune is played can have a profound effect on how the dancers dance.

The second aspect would be the caller. Some callers read from their cards; some callers don't use cards because they know the dances and don't need them. Some callers are more relaxed, move differently, have a showy style or a more low-key style; callers differ in many ways. The same person could differ substantially depending on outside factors. How the caller calls the dance also has a profound effect on the dancers.

Then there are the dancers themselves. In addition to responding to the music and the calling, different dancers have different styles. If someone were to add in some dance moves that weren’t part of the dance, that might make even a boring dance suddenly be fun.

All of these differences would be examples of behavioral variability. For the dancers, that variability could take the form of minor improvisation, or it could take the form of fairly radical changes to a dance. Of course, variability doesn’t always make something better. Many of us have had the experience of trying something new that just didn’t work. Probably most of us have experienced the results of someone else trying something new that disrupted the dance, sometimes badly. Likewise I've heard music played with very unclear phrasing, no distinguishable rhythm and even without clear melody. But sometimes several factors come together and produce an evenng of outstanding music and dance.

I’ve mentioned that some of the older dances, especially those found in older dance manuals and not danced frequently these days, appear not to be very interesting. Some of them probably were danced a few times and then dropped out of the repertoire. But some appear in a number of dance manuals so likely were fairly widely danced. So let’s think about how people fill out dances to make them more fun and interesting, to the point where they continue dancing them sometimes for generations.

Changes in New England Country Dance III: 1965–1985

Western square dancing caught on gradually, but then became very popular nationally and very quickly displaced the traditional town hall dances of New England. A friend from western Massachussetts told me how he and his wife stopped dancing with a very healthy dance community in place, and came back a few years and discovered all the dances they knew were gone, displaced by club-stsyle Western square dancing. In New Hampshire there was still dancing in Nelson even when nearly all the other dances had stopped.

Dudley Laufman & the Contradance Revival

The near-absence of traditional dancing changed suddenly in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s when Dudley Laufman led a revival of the more traditional town hall public dance. Dudley was very strongly influenced by Ralph, and at first there wasn’t a great change as far as I can tell. Greater emphasis was put on the music than had been previously, leading to the glorious live music of the Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra. Dudley was considerably less controlling than most earlier callers in terms of style and dress and other such issues (even if some modern dancers might feel he didn’t go far enough).

Dudley did dances in Nelson, Peterborough and the rest of the Monadnock region, and throughout much of the rest of the state. In the Seacoast region he had a regular dance at the Durham Grange, later at the Unitarian Fellowship in Durham, and in various other town halls. He had a strong following of younger dancers (often referred to as “Dudley dancers”), including many brought to the dances (and in some cases to the state) by the back to the land movement and related influences. Many of his dancers came in from rural areas, and the dance was an important time for people to see their friends.

The dances reflected the values of the time and the culture from which many of the dancers came. They tended to have an egalitarian spirit that may not have existed to such an extent before. The idea of switching partners became more popular even among established couples, to the point where for a number of years there were only a small number of couples who danced more than one to three dances together in an evening. It was thought that no one should be too good or bad a dancer to dance with anyone else, and there shouldn’t be social class barriers at a dance to keep people from dancing together.

There were sometimes clashes of values between the new dancers and some of the long-time New Hampshire dancers who didn’t necessarily share those values. In Fitzwilliam, where Dudley sometimes called and where Duke Miller did his summer series, there was active monitoring to make sure no one was dancing barefoot. Those who were caught were asked in no uncertain terms to put their shoes on. Interestingly some of the old-timers thought the new dancers were too sedate. The younger dancers didn’t think dancing and drinking went together, whereas the old-timers were more likely to drink, sometimes to the point of getting rowdy and even fighting.

The revival spread throughout New England. Then it spread nationally, often brought to a region by someone who had danced to Dudley and moved away. As there was no contradancing where they moved, people would learn to call and to play the music, and start a local dance.

When I first started dancing, in the Monadnock region (around 1980) you could still see hints of the earlier period. Although dancers were considerably more energetic in their style than Ralph would have liked, they had at the same time a smoothness of style and sense of timing that many modern dancers lack. Even as a relatively immature dancer with little knowledge of historical context and a preference for more energetic dances, I could tell there was something special about dancing Money Musk in Francestown with everyone dancing completely together and on the beat for those (quite noisy) balances as well as for the rest of the dance.

Variability, mutations, Western square dancing and the contradance revival

I don’t think I could put more unrelated concepts into one title and have it make sense. One of the important concepts from evolutionary theory is that of mutations: random changes in the DNA that affects characteristics of the organism. Many mutations are harmful to the organism and don't get passed on. Some are relatively neutral but do contribute to genetic variability. Now and then there is a major mutation that at least in the short term facilitates survival to reproduce, and it can become prevalent very fast, often taking over the role of some previous traits.

There is a behavioral equivalent, which is probably related to the concept of creativity. Both the introduction of Western square dancing and Dudley's contradance revival were examples of something very different, new and exciting. Compared to what was prevalent at the time they could be considered mutations. These were successful mutations: both quickly became prevalent. The Becket formation contra is probably another example. Other attempts at radical innovation are less successful. You can probably remember dancing a dance that was very different that never caught on.

To The Present

In this section we move to the present to look at how all these changes as well as areas of stability in the New England dance tradition have combined to produce the style that characterizes dancing in the present. Of course it's important to mention that the immediate present is characterized by a complete lack of dancing, and it could be several months to a few years before it's safe to dance again. That kind of a break could result in an alteration in dance style and repertoire when it starts up again.

Adaptations of dances to fit the modern dancer

I have been discussing some of the changes in traditional dance over the years. I’d like to finish by looking at some modern adaptations of dances to fit the modern dancers.

So how do we characterize the current dancing? It’s tempting to characterize it in terms of what has been lost; people have always done that, and we probably will do that for the dancing of twenty years from now. Clearly many things have been lost. Stepping is largely lost, and in many place any hints of elegance or gracefulness have been lost. People often laugh when I suggest dancing a dance elegantly; it’s a foreign concept to them. [From 2020: I rarely even suggest such a thing anymore.] There aren’t many dancers who have a good sense of how to fill out the music when dancing figures that can be done more quickly. However, these have been replaced with other qualities that would have gone over the heads of previous dancers just as their preferences are lost on modern dancers.

In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, the most prevalent embellishment was probably the twirl. We put twirls in ladies chains (sometimes up to six or more), do-si-dos (which was previously largely unknown), turning as a couple, and in Maine even on crossing the set during rights and lefts. In my opinion this sort of twirl has become an established part of contradancing and won’t go away for a long time. But at the same time it is less salient as a feature of the 1990’s than it was ten years ago. People simply do it without thinking rather than to prove a point or show off. And it’s relatively rare to see it carried to excess as it was several years ago (although Ted Sannella tells me this is less true in other parts of the country). [From the perspective of 2020, twirls seem in fact to have become a part of the tradition, and at the same time they are overall less common and less overdone than in the 1990s.]

It seems that the most salient feature of modern dancing might be a mixture of complexity and constant movement (think about how that relates to modern Western square dancing). At many modern contradances each dance involves fairly complex, fast-moving figures. There are some callers who call such complex and fast-moving dances that [in 2019 with bad feet] I have to wait until the walk-through is done to decide if I can dance it. When a dance is called that goes at the pace of most dances thirty years earlier, many dancers finish figures very early and stand there not knowing what to do until the next figure is called.

This style isn’t really to my preference as I’ve pointed out before, but it certainly can be fun. We are seeing a shift from a time when it was what you did while dancing (stepping, gracefulness, etc.) that was important to a time in which the figures themselves have become the most important part, and style of dancing (individual or group) less relevant. And there’s no doubt that as a result the best modern dances have more interesting figures than many old ones, or that transitions from one figure to the next are much smoother in many of the modern dances.

What happened to the chestnuts?

I’d like to finish by looking at what happened to the chestnut contras. There is no one answer; in some places they are danced pretty much as always, and in other places they aren’t danced at all.

In the Seacoast area of New Hampshire I put a lot of effort into keeping them as part of the repertoire. I called them, I wrote about them in the Seacoast Country Dance Newsletter. We have been lucky enough to have the Ralph Page Dance Legacy Weekend in Durham, which tries to keep the older dances and dance styles alive and part of the modern tradition. Ted Sannella asked me to be on the organizing committee as the first of my generation and at the time one of the few New Hampshire dancers to be involved. I considered that to be a major honor. Ted worked hard to make sure the older traditions were respected while at the same time representing newer ways as well. When Ted was no long able to do that I worked hard to preserve that. At least in part as a result of those efforts we’ve continued to dance the chestnuts more in the Seacoast area than perhaps anywhere else, and I think we tend to dance them with better style than in most places, the exception being some of the long-time dancers from the Monadnock region.

But regardless, certain evolutionary trends can be seen nearly everywhere.

Some dances are simply danced differently than they used to be. Back in the mid 1970s Dudley was calling Petronella and a group of dancers decided to have some fun with it. Instead of just the actives dancing the “round to your right and balance” part, they invited the inactives to join in, forming a diamond-shaped group of dancers. They had enough fun that this rapidly spread and became the new way to dance the dance. More recently people started clapping during that part of the dance. There are, of course, other lesser-known variations. For example, with the inactives dancing, if the actives are strong dancers the inactives can go the other way around the diamond. Then the musicians became involved, dropping out for the balances. The Lamprey River Band, after doing that a couple times, sometimes would then drop out for a balance and not come back in, and we’d see how long the dancers would keep dancing.

Other chestnuts changed too over time. In Rory O’More people twirled to change places. In Lamplighter’s Hornpipe we would take hands diagonally with the inactives for the last balance.

But perhaps the most major trend has been to compose new dances that take the distinctive figure of one of the chestnuts and incorporate it into an entirely new dance that is otherwise much more active and fast-moving. These days there are many dancers who are familiar with the distinctive figures of many of the chestnuts, but may never have danced the original dance.