Swing Your Partner, Do-si-do

Saturday night, I had the opportunity to peek into another world. I was in a YMCA gym in Chinatown. A band was playing traditional reels with a Klezmer bent, due to a rather jazzy clarinetist. There were perhaps seventy or eighty people, from teenagers to septuagenarians, and they were dancing. Together.

Just a few blocks away from the pulsating gaggle of Lower East Side clubs, I was getting my first taste of contra dancing. A friend of mine had taken some English country dance classes through the organization that runs this contra dance night, and she invited me to come. I was curious. I had never heard of contra dancing, but she kindly included a YouTube video in her invitation.

Plug "contra dancing" into YouTube, and you get quite a range of results, from square-dance-esque to techno contra dancing beneath a blacklight. My personal favorite was a video billed as "Dirty Cool Contra."

When I walked into the YMCA gym and was reminded by the "Shoe Police" to clean my shoes, I had the sensation that I was in a Christopher Guest movie. The place was pretty empty at first, and it seemed like we were among the kind of people that like to attend Renaissance Faires in costume or go to Civil War re-enactments. I started to privately fret about whether being there would detract from my coolness, but my friend had some reassuring words for me: "This is a much younger crowd than English country dancing."

But despite a sophomoric worry over my grade of cool, I was curious. Why were these college students here? How did everybody find this place?

There was a mini-lesson for beginners starting, so we looked on. "You're probably all here because a friend brought you, right?" asked the instructor/caller. Everyone agreed, except for a woman who let us all know that she had found out about it on the internet. "I'm visiting my daughter from Michigan, and I wanted to see if there was any contra dancing in New York."

Lady, we have everything in New York. If you can think of an obscure subculture, it exists here. If you wanted to say, weave your own cheesecloth, there are probably five cheesecloth-weaving meet-ups in Brooklyn. But somehow, even I was surprised by the contra dancing. It just seemed like a room full of the sort of people I would encounter while performing at the Renaissance Festival in costume as a teenager (yes, I know it was uncool, but I only started doing it because my mom bribed me with a handmade leather collar adorned with a wolf-sword medallion and chains). It seemed strange that these people should be in the city, defiantly flouting the iron rule of fashion by appearing in t-shirts paired with patchwork flared skirts.

But I cannot pretend that the crowd was of uniform appearance. Yes, there were some country skirts in there, but there were also tattooed punk kids and a guy with a huge white beard wearing cut-off shorts. Also, there were people who appeared perfectly normal. I tried to concentrate on the dance steps I was learning. The gypsy, the do-si-do, the swing... it seemed pretty easy. But when the band started playing, I had no idea what to do.

The caller stood at the front of the room and named the steps. "Circle!"

"Whew!" I thought. "I can dance in a circle."

But then I was supposed to rotate and trade places with the person opposite me. Worst of all, I was dancing the lead (male) role due to a shortage of men. In contra dancing, one moves up and down a line of "neighbors," maintaining the same partner, but dancing with another group of people each time. By the time I got to the front of the set, I started to feel more comfortable, but then the dance was over.

A middle-aged Indian man asked me for the next dance. He knew what he was doing, which was a blessing. I kept apologizing as I continually forgot what I was supposed to do. I felt like I must really be annoying the people who were seasoned dancers as I blundered into their path. Contra dancing is a great way to meet people or spread disease, as you dance with literally everyone in the room.

Each song was about twenty minutes long, and I was starting to get dizzy from being swung around in a circle so many times. I didn't expect to sweat, but my bangs were plastered to my forehead. We broke for complimentary water and hand sanitizer. The dances were getting more complicated, and I wasn't getting any more offers for a partner due to my embarrassing showing on the dance floor, so I sat and watched. Old couples twirled with more enthusiasm than the college students. First-timers blundered about. It was honestly the oddest mix of people I've ever seen in one place, but nobody seemed to care about dancing with someone fifty years older or younger than themselves. It dawned on me that all this was fueled entirely by lemonade and oreos.

Despite myself, I had fun. Maybe it's because I'm such an abysmal dancer, and I enjoy looking stupid in front of strangers in the YMCA. No, that can't be it, because I quit the Park Slope Y for that very reason (looking stupid in front of strangers). I think I honestly enjoyed the personal interaction in that gym, though I would normally never talk to any of my fellow dancers on the street or on line at Whole Foods.

And that is what gives contra dancing its cache. It is almost cool- in a nerdy way. In fact, I'd be surprised if there aren't bearded guys and tattooed girls in Williamsburg contra dancing tonight as they knock back microbrews and home-cured sausages. It has just enough folksy charm to be appropriated by hipsters, just like antique bicycles and boater hats.

If I can say I was contra dancing two years before anybody in Williamsburg was doing it, will that convince you that I'm still cool?

B.S.