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That stands for "New England Folk Festival Association", so I don't know why the annual festival they put on isn't called NEFF, but it isn't; it's universally called NEFFA. Whatever they choose to call it, it's always fun.
Every April, over the weekend following Massachusetts schools' spring break, thousands of Folk folks gather at the high school in Natick, MA (a convenient half-hour drive from Cambridge). There's a huge variety of participatory dancing, dance performance, musical performance, crafts, etc., not to mention the fact that you can't walk 20 feet along any corridor without coming across a group of musicians jamming,
We, or course, go primarily for the contra-dancing, of which there is quite a lot, with a wide variety of (mostly excellent) bands and callers. It's often almost too crowded to dance (for at least one of the more popular sessions on Saturday, strike "almost"), but we've learned to cope. Easy to get completely exhausted, which we managed to do on all three days. (It probably helped that Friday was a really nice day and we spent the afternoon in Gloucester working in the garden.)
I wish they had more sessions specified as gender-role free, but those of us from the various GLB dances who attend have been engaging in a bit of guerilla activity by dancing with each other at the officially "gendered" sessions. I danced quite a few dances in the "bare-arm" (traditional "woman's" or "following") role, and I've noticed that, over the 4-5 years we've been going to NEFFA, the amount of surprise, alarm, or puzzlement that this produces on the part of the other dancers (especially the men) has decreased almost to nonexistence. This is good; I like the idea of establishing it as a norm that the dancer coming at you in any given situation might be of either sex.
One thing that I have noticed is that the (presumably) straight men do tend to swing and twirl me rather vigorously -- I might almost say aggressively. I can think of various possible explanations for this: (1) They want to show that they're "real" men, even though they're dancing with another man; (2) they're trying to avoid seeming too flirtatious (although I've noticed that fewer and fewer of them are avoiding eye contact);(3) since I'm a guy, they figure there's less danger of "breaking" me than if I were a woman; (4) straight men, by and large, tend to be more aggressive dancers than most of the people I normally dance with, and this is the way they always dance. It's probably some combination of the above.
Anyway, it was a nice way to spend a weekend.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jwg took a few minutes on Friday measuring halls and counting dancers, as part of the ongoing research into possible Camp sites.
Every April, over the weekend following Massachusetts schools' spring break, thousands of Folk folks gather at the high school in Natick, MA (a convenient half-hour drive from Cambridge). There's a huge variety of participatory dancing, dance performance, musical performance, crafts, etc., not to mention the fact that you can't walk 20 feet along any corridor without coming across a group of musicians jamming,
We, or course, go primarily for the contra-dancing, of which there is quite a lot, with a wide variety of (mostly excellent) bands and callers. It's often almost too crowded to dance (for at least one of the more popular sessions on Saturday, strike "almost"), but we've learned to cope. Easy to get completely exhausted, which we managed to do on all three days. (It probably helped that Friday was a really nice day and we spent the afternoon in Gloucester working in the garden.)
I wish they had more sessions specified as gender-role free, but those of us from the various GLB dances who attend have been engaging in a bit of guerilla activity by dancing with each other at the officially "gendered" sessions. I danced quite a few dances in the "bare-arm" (traditional "woman's" or "following") role, and I've noticed that, over the 4-5 years we've been going to NEFFA, the amount of surprise, alarm, or puzzlement that this produces on the part of the other dancers (especially the men) has decreased almost to nonexistence. This is good; I like the idea of establishing it as a norm that the dancer coming at you in any given situation might be of either sex.
One thing that I have noticed is that the (presumably) straight men do tend to swing and twirl me rather vigorously -- I might almost say aggressively. I can think of various possible explanations for this: (1) They want to show that they're "real" men, even though they're dancing with another man; (2) they're trying to avoid seeming too flirtatious (although I've noticed that fewer and fewer of them are avoiding eye contact);(3) since I'm a guy, they figure there's less danger of "breaking" me than if I were a woman; (4) straight men, by and large, tend to be more aggressive dancers than most of the people I normally dance with, and this is the way they always dance. It's probably some combination of the above.
Anyway, it was a nice way to spend a weekend.
jwg took a few minutes on Friday measuring halls and counting dancers, as part of the ongoing research into possible Camp sites.
