A popular icebreaker in San Francisco these days is “How would you spend your life if AGI meant nobody needed to work?” For me, I think a surprisingly big part of the answer is a dorky-sounding kind of folk dance called contra dancing.
I started trying to answer that question by thinking: what are the things I do atelically—because I enjoy them for their own sake, not in pursuit of some longer-term goal? For me, a lot of that has to do with things that are (1) physically joyful, and (2) help me feel connected to other people.
My pitch for contra dancing is that among physically joyful and connecting activities, it’s one of the ones where it’s easiest to get to the point where it’s fun, and therefore one of the best to start out with. Many other forms of dance require weeks of lessons before you’re even encouraged to do it socially at all. By contrast, the format of contra dancing means that you can go to a half-hour beginner lesson before your first dance, and there’s a good chance you will be having a lot of fun by the end of the evening.
What’s more, the fact that it’s so easy to start having fun shapes its community and priorities, such that it has among the best vibes of any activity I do.
I first encountered contra in middle school. My mom ran an intentional community, and we had a housemate move in named Bree. Bree was obsessed with this thing called “contra dancing,” and every week she would try to convince me and our other housemates to come with her.
Which I absolutely refused. I was an extremely uncool middle schooler, and that meant I was terrified of doing anything that even whiffed of uncoolness, lest I give my classmates another reason to judge me. I was also deeply awkward; I’d never even been to a school dance and barely talked to girls. But Bree was persistent, and one of our other housemates got hooked, and eventually I was intrigued.
By then, though, I was dug in as a contra hater, and I was scared that if I admitted I had changed my mind, my housemates would make fun of me. So I kept refusing.
Finally, my housemate Thomas, who was even more of a skeptic than I was, told Bree that he would only go if I went, presumably so that she would stop bugging him and bug me instead. Aha—my golden opportunity! I could pass off my change of heart as a prank on Thomas. “Okay, sure! It’s a deal!”
Bree and I showed up at the Concord Scout House one Thursday evening and jumped into the next dance. It was an unusually complex square dance, and I got confused—in fact, so confused that my entire square ended up giving up halfway through.1
I was mortified. Not only was I doing a deeply uncool activity, I was the least cool person there, ruining it for all the slightly less uncool people with my incompetence and lameness.
Except that the other dancers didn’t seem to see it that way. Instead of resenting me or making fun of me, they said things like “Gosh, that one was really tricky!” and “Sorry, that’s really not what it’s usually like!” and “Please don’t give up, try a few more dances! Want to dance with me?”
I tried some more dances, I didn’t cause any more collapses, and by the end of the night I was overflowing with exhilaration and joy. I went back the next week, and the week after that. I went to the twelve-hour Snow Ball and then the weekend-long Flurry Festival. I got to feel cool for the first time in my life when people started being excited to dance with me, and even cooler when some of them asked me on dates. It was a huge part of my life for a while, and although I’m now dancing at maybe a quarter of my peak intensity, it’s still one of my most joyful and treasured things I do.
This happens to about one in ten people I take contra dancing: something clicks and it becomes a big part of their life.
So what exactly is contra dancing?
When people ask me this I often feel stuck, because describing the mechanics of a contra dance doesn’t really capture its essence or why it’s fun, but without understanding the mechanics, the essence doesn’t really make sense. So I’ll try both. But you have to promise to read through to the essence part, and not just bounce off if the mechanics sound silly.
Mechanically: you show up to the dance hall. You ask someone to dance, or they ask you. You join a long line (“set”) of other couples and take hands in a four-person group with one adjacent (“neighbor”) couple. A caller stands at the top of the dance hall and does a “walk-through” of the dance you’re about to do, calling out a series of figures (“circle left three places,” “do-si-do your neighbor,” etc.) At the end, you’ve moved up or down the line, and you’re ready to do the same thing with some new neighbors coming at you.
Next to the caller is a live band. (They probably sound a bit like this.) The pianist plays four potatoes and the fiddler launches into a reel. The caller calls out the figures for the first few times through the dance, then drops out as the dancers get into flow.
It looks a bit like this video, although I don’t know how much this will transmit the vibe, since contra is a lot more fun to do than it is to watch:
Bonus: you can see high school me in this dance! I'm in the dark red T-shirt at the very right of the frame at the beginning.
To me, the essence of contra dancing is about flow, joy, and community.
You can’t really tell from watching, but a lot of what makes for good contra dancing is learning how to trade momentum back and forth (“share weight”) with other dancers so that each figure flows seamlessly into the next one. When you get this right, it feels amazing. Subtle changes in how your partner holds your hand cue you into the next figure. The dance becomes effortless. You can turn your brain off and just do what the giant dancing super-organism invites you to do.
It’s also physically joyful. The core figure of contra dancing is called the swing, in which you and your partner take a waltz-like hold and pivot around a shared center. Done right, it feels like a cross between flying and a world-class hug. Even outside of the swing, the shared weight, smooth momentum, and twirling “flourishes” will make you feel weightless, graceful and deeply connected to the music and the other dancers.
Lots of kinds of dance feel flowy and exhilarating when done well. What makes contra different is how easy it is to get there. Most forms of dance require weeks of lessons before they get fun. In contra, all you need to do is show up for one beginner lesson half an hour before the dance starts.2 Of course, there’s plenty to learn after that—improving your swing technique, learning how to share weight, and where to put flourishes for the best joy and flow—but all of that is for getting you from a 8/10 to an 11/10 on the fun scale; getting to an 8 is pretty straightforward.
So contra makes it easy to have a baseline level of fun dancing with anyone. And because it’s a group dance, you end up feeling connected to your entire set, not just your partner. I think those two things are behind my other favorite part of contra dancing, which is how friendly and welcoming the community is.
Many kinds of dance are a bit snooty—the experienced dancers look down on newbies and try to avoid dancing with them. By contrast, my experience at my first dance, where I caused my square to crash and burn and was met with apologies and “I hope you’ll give it another shot,” is typical for contra. A lot of contras explicitly ask experienced dancers to dance with newcomers. It’s just hard to be snooty when you’re having so much fun! You want to share it with everyone.3
As draft reader Chloe put it: “I think in many ways, your story of your first dance is the heart of it—you can’t do it wrong. Or even if you do, it somehow leads to more love.”
In my opinion, this makes contra dancing one of the best entry points to dance:
Each dance is walked through, so you don’t have to worry about deciding what to do.
You can get to an 8/10 fun level, where practice becomes rewarding instead of a chore, really quickly.
The community is incredibly welcoming, which makes it a lot less stressful to be a beginner.
While it’s structured enough to be beginner-friendly, there’s also enough room for improvisation and technique to give it a lot of depth. This makes it a great on-ramp to other dances and movement practices. When I started contra dancing I had a lot of fear and blocks about improvised dancing (for example, I didn’t feel comfortable dancing at standard American high school/wedding style dances), but recently I tried out fusion and contact improv and had fun at both. It’s pretty common for people to use contra as a gateway into more difficult forms of dance.
Most importantly, though, it’s just incredibly joyful on its own! It’s the only activity I know of where I’ve had multiple friends mention that every time they go, their cheeks hurt from smiling so much.
Beyond just fun, multiple draft readers independently commented that contra dance is a precise opposite of many things that bother them about… the rest of life:
Much of my life happens on a screen in motionless silence; contra is as three-dimensional, movement- and sound-filled as you can get.
The default mood of a lot of spaces is a sort of ironic detachment.4 The default mood of contra dancing is earnest joy.
In everyday life it’s easy to end up atomized and isolated. At a contra, everyone does the same steps and makes the dance together; it’s deeply communal.
In a lot of social contexts (especially in San Francisco), I often feel like I’m being “sized up” for how interesting or important I am. At most contras, people are just happy I’m there.
Many things I do (work, choral music, blogging…) reward excellence above almost everything. Contra welcomes imperfection: we’d rather have an amateur live band than recorded professionals, and don’t believe in more than half an hour of organized teaching.
This makes it a grounding and nourishing antitode to a lot of everyday stressors. When I was so drawn to it in middle school, I don’t think it was just about the fun: on some deep level it was very good for me.
If I’ve gotten you excited enough to try contra, here’s what you should do:
Go to try contra dot com to find dances near you. If there are multiple dances, I recommend trying to figure out which one is the largest (larger dances tend to have more energy and better vibes), although that might be tricky to figure out from the websites.
Make a note of where and when the dance is, including the beginner lesson. Remember to show up beforehand for that!
Dress code wise: contra dancing is generally light cardio; wear something you are happy to be active in.5
Most people dress pretty casually; many women (and some men!) wear skirts, especially skirts that do fun things when you twirl.
Look at the dance site to see if they say anything about footwear; some dances request that you wear soft-soled shoes with clean soles to avoid damaging floors.
Bring a water bottle! There are fountains at most dances but it helps to be able to hydrate more quickly since the breaks between dances are short.
If you go to a dance and like it, the easiest way to go from 8/10 fun to 9.5/10 is to find someone with a really good swing and ask them how you can improve your technique. (If you’re not sure, look for someone who’s fast and smooth.) They will be tickled that you asked!6
If you have a friend who contra dances, try going with them! They will be thrilled to bring you and it’ll be even more fun for both of you.7
Have fun! I hope you smile so much your cheeks hurt.
Thanks to Jeff Kaufman, Alex Allain, Chloe Lubinski, and Jessie Brown for commenting on a draft of this post.
This is at least a 1-in-10,000 event; I’ve never seen it happen again in over 20 years of regular dancing.
In fact, you can probably get away without even that!
Another benefit of this is that contra is much more intergenerational than most forms of dance. I have dance friends in their twenties and seventies!
At least for me, when I overuse ironic detachment it has subtle but far-reaching effects on how I see and engage with the world. It’s an easy way to amuse people, but ends up masking or numbing out a lot of more “real” responses. I’ve found it really interesting and a bit psychoactive to play what I call “the ironic detachment game,” in which I am banned from responding to anything in an ironically detached way.
I personally sweat a lot and usually bring multiple shirts to change into, although most other dancers I know don’t need to do this.
Teaching a swing is a separate skill from just having a good swing, so you may want to ask a few different people.
I recently started a mission to get my friends into contra dancing (hence also this post)! It’s going shockingly well and it’s made it way more fun for me!
A popular icebreaker in San Francisco these days is “How would you spend your life if AGI meant nobody needed to work?” For me, I think a surprisingly big part of the answer is a dorky-sounding kind of folk dance called contra dancing.
I started trying to answer that question by thinking: what are the things I do atelically—because I enjoy them for their own sake, not in pursuit of some longer-term goal? For me, a lot of that has to do with things that are (1) physically joyful, and (2) help me feel connected to other people.
My pitch for contra dancing is that among physically joyful and connecting activities, it’s one of the ones where it’s easiest to get to the point where it’s fun, and therefore one of the best to start out with. Many other forms of dance require weeks of lessons before you’re even encouraged to do it socially at all. By contrast, the format of contra dancing means that you can go to a half-hour beginner lesson before your first dance, and there’s a good chance you will be having a lot of fun by the end of the evening.
What’s more, the fact that it’s so easy to start having fun shapes its community and priorities, such that it has among the best vibes of any activity I do.
I first encountered contra in middle school. My mom ran an intentional community, and we had a housemate move in named Bree. Bree was obsessed with this thing called “contra dancing,” and every week she would try to convince me and our other housemates to come with her.
Which I absolutely refused. I was an extremely uncool middle schooler, and that meant I was terrified of doing anything that even whiffed of uncoolness, lest I give my classmates another reason to judge me. I was also deeply awkward; I’d never even been to a school dance and barely talked to girls. But Bree was persistent, and one of our other housemates got hooked, and eventually I was intrigued.
By then, though, I was dug in as a contra hater, and I was scared that if I admitted I had changed my mind, my housemates would make fun of me. So I kept refusing.
Finally, my housemate Thomas, who was even more of a skeptic than I was, told Bree that he would only go if I went, presumably so that she would stop bugging him and bug me instead. Aha—my golden opportunity! I could pass off my change of heart as a prank on Thomas. “Okay, sure! It’s a deal!”
Bree and I showed up at the Concord Scout House one Thursday evening and jumped into the next dance. It was an unusually complex square dance, and I got confused—in fact, so confused that my entire square ended up giving up halfway through.1
I was mortified. Not only was I doing a deeply uncool activity, I was the least cool person there, ruining it for all the slightly less uncool people with my incompetence and lameness.
Except that the other dancers didn’t seem to see it that way. Instead of resenting me or making fun of me, they said things like “Gosh, that one was really tricky!” and “Sorry, that’s really not what it’s usually like!” and “Please don’t give up, try a few more dances! Want to dance with me?”
I tried some more dances, I didn’t cause any more collapses, and by the end of the night I was overflowing with exhilaration and joy. I went back the next week, and the week after that. I went to the twelve-hour Snow Ball and then the weekend-long Flurry Festival. I got to feel cool for the first time in my life when people started being excited to dance with me, and even cooler when some of them asked me on dates. It was a huge part of my life for a while, and although I’m now dancing at maybe a quarter of my peak intensity, it’s still one of my most joyful and treasured things I do.
This happens to about one in ten people I take contra dancing: something clicks and it becomes a big part of their life.
So what exactly is contra dancing?
When people ask me this I often feel stuck, because describing the mechanics of a contra dance doesn’t really capture its essence or why it’s fun, but without understanding the mechanics, the essence doesn’t really make sense. So I’ll try both. But you have to promise to read through to the essence part, and not just bounce off if the mechanics sound silly.
Mechanically: you show up to the dance hall. You ask someone to dance, or they ask you. You join a long line (“set”) of other couples and take hands in a four-person group with one adjacent (“neighbor”) couple. A caller stands at the top of the dance hall and does a “walk-through” of the dance you’re about to do, calling out a series of figures (“circle left three places,” “do-si-do your neighbor,” etc.) At the end, you’ve moved up or down the line, and you’re ready to do the same thing with some new neighbors coming at you.
Next to the caller is a live band. (They probably sound a bit like this.) The pianist plays four potatoes and the fiddler launches into a reel. The caller calls out the figures for the first few times through the dance, then drops out as the dancers get into flow.
It looks a bit like this video, although I don’t know how much this will transmit the vibe, since contra is a lot more fun to do than it is to watch:
To me, the essence of contra dancing is about flow, joy, and community.
You can’t really tell from watching, but a lot of what makes for good contra dancing is learning how to trade momentum back and forth (“share weight”) with other dancers so that each figure flows seamlessly into the next one. When you get this right, it feels amazing. Subtle changes in how your partner holds your hand cue you into the next figure. The dance becomes effortless. You can turn your brain off and just do what the giant dancing super-organism invites you to do.
It’s also physically joyful. The core figure of contra dancing is called the swing, in which you and your partner take a waltz-like hold and pivot around a shared center. Done right, it feels like a cross between flying and a world-class hug. Even outside of the swing, the shared weight, smooth momentum, and twirling “flourishes” will make you feel weightless, graceful and deeply connected to the music and the other dancers.
Lots of kinds of dance feel flowy and exhilarating when done well. What makes contra different is how easy it is to get there. Most forms of dance require weeks of lessons before they get fun. In contra, all you need to do is show up for one beginner lesson half an hour before the dance starts.2 Of course, there’s plenty to learn after that—improving your swing technique, learning how to share weight, and where to put flourishes for the best joy and flow—but all of that is for getting you from a 8/10 to an 11/10 on the fun scale; getting to an 8 is pretty straightforward.
So contra makes it easy to have a baseline level of fun dancing with anyone. And because it’s a group dance, you end up feeling connected to your entire set, not just your partner. I think those two things are behind my other favorite part of contra dancing, which is how friendly and welcoming the community is.
Many kinds of dance are a bit snooty—the experienced dancers look down on newbies and try to avoid dancing with them. By contrast, my experience at my first dance, where I caused my square to crash and burn and was met with apologies and “I hope you’ll give it another shot,” is typical for contra. A lot of contras explicitly ask experienced dancers to dance with newcomers. It’s just hard to be snooty when you’re having so much fun! You want to share it with everyone.3
As draft reader Chloe put it: “I think in many ways, your story of your first dance is the heart of it—you can’t do it wrong. Or even if you do, it somehow leads to more love.”
In my opinion, this makes contra dancing one of the best entry points to dance:
While it’s structured enough to be beginner-friendly, there’s also enough room for improvisation and technique to give it a lot of depth. This makes it a great on-ramp to other dances and movement practices. When I started contra dancing I had a lot of fear and blocks about improvised dancing (for example, I didn’t feel comfortable dancing at standard American high school/wedding style dances), but recently I tried out fusion and contact improv and had fun at both. It’s pretty common for people to use contra as a gateway into more difficult forms of dance.
Most importantly, though, it’s just incredibly joyful on its own! It’s the only activity I know of where I’ve had multiple friends mention that every time they go, their cheeks hurt from smiling so much.
Beyond just fun, multiple draft readers independently commented that contra dance is a precise opposite of many things that bother them about… the rest of life:
Much of my life happens on a screen in motionless silence; contra is as three-dimensional, movement- and sound-filled as you can get.
The default mood of a lot of spaces is a sort of ironic detachment.4 The default mood of contra dancing is earnest joy.
In everyday life it’s easy to end up atomized and isolated. At a contra, everyone does the same steps and makes the dance together; it’s deeply communal.
In a lot of social contexts (especially in San Francisco), I often feel like I’m being “sized up” for how interesting or important I am. At most contras, people are just happy I’m there.
Many things I do (work, choral music, blogging…) reward excellence above almost everything. Contra welcomes imperfection: we’d rather have an amateur live band than recorded professionals, and don’t believe in more than half an hour of organized teaching.
This makes it a grounding and nourishing antitode to a lot of everyday stressors. When I was so drawn to it in middle school, I don’t think it was just about the fun: on some deep level it was very good for me.
If I’ve gotten you excited enough to try contra, here’s what you should do:
Have fun! I hope you smile so much your cheeks hurt.
Thanks to Jeff Kaufman, Alex Allain, Chloe Lubinski, and Jessie Brown for commenting on a draft of this post.
Further reading/listening/other consumption: