NEFFA

[rsc]

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. jwg took a few minutes on Friday measuring halls and counting dancers, as part of the ongoing research into possible Camp sites.

Comments

[pinkfish.livejournal.com]

For some of the aggressive-swinging men, I have projected the motivation that (5) everyone knows that twirling takes years of practice to do well, and women have had those years of practice. Thus, twirling well is something that will remind the follower who is a man that he really isn't a woman, and can't try to act like one.

This projection made more sense in the days when the Neffa men were more antagonistic to the idea of men dancing with men.

Also, I take my own perverse pride in twirling very well (and in performing "White Nights" power twirls), just to make my own testosterone-poisoned version of following.

[rsc.livejournal.com]

Actually, one thing that does annoy me is that most of the men insist on twirling me coming out of a chain, which is something I don't really like to do when it's crowded. I was taught that twirling is a mutual-agreement thing -- you don't do it unless both parties want it. But I had a lot of men simply jerk my hand up by main force. I wondered if this was because a courtesy turn is more physical contact than they're comfortable with -- yet these same men swing me without blinking an eye, so I just don't know.

[pinkfish.livejournal.com]

Where I grew up, twirling was considered an advanced move, done as a sort of spice here and there, and certainly not regularly as a rule. The first time I danced in New England (in a "gendered" setting) I was stunned many times as the women I was dancing with immediately assumed that they would twirl, and I had to adjust quickly to give them leeway to do so.

As for twirling in a crowded space, depending on how the crowd is pressing, I sometimes prefer to twirl in that, done in a certain way, twirling can take less space in some directions than not twirling. But it is harder to control, so when done with a stranger, it almost always takes more space.

I managed to avoid contra dancing very much at all this weekend (I think all the contra sessions were opposite times when I was performing, or something). I only manged the one gender-free medley (!That was quite the excursion!) during 8 hours of Neffa.