By Gretchen Gibbs
Orange Environment is hosting a barn dance on March 24, and the occasion turned me to thinking about gender, dancing in general and barn dancing in particular. A number of men of my acquaintance “won’t dance, don’t ask ‘em” and yet some of these same men will show up at a barn dance. Why? I wondered.

I took a trip to the Galapagos not long ago and watched the mating dances of the blue-footed booby and the albatross. With birds, although sometimes the female joins in, it is the male who dances, his beautiful plumage puffed up to heighten his attractiveness. Why don’t men follow the lead, so to speak, of our animal counterparts? At some periods in history, they did flaunt their bodies, as in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when they wore tights, mini skirts and codpieces. I don’t think they practiced mating dances per se, though.

I looked up the history of dance in that universal font of wisdom, Wikipedia, and found that someone, a male, has a theory about the origins of dance. He says that primitive man (presumably not woman) danced to induce an altered state of consciousness preparatory to battle. Like the Maori dance, the haka, I suppose, which is so fierce and hypnotic that it strikes awe and fear in the beholder. At least it did in me when I saw one, a highlight of a trip to New Zealand. The New Zealand All Blacks still perform a haka before starting each rugby match www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4LNjNXt1yM.

I tried to develop a theory of my own. There is male dance, like the haka, or female dance, like waltzing around with one’s beloved in fancy plumage. Perhaps Freud’s theory was better: dance could focus on aggressive needs vs. sexual needs. After all, women can dance aggressively and men can perform those mating rites.

And that brought me back to barn dancing, which didn’t fit my theory or Freud’s. Barn dancing is not aggressive, neither is it romantic and sexual. As I noted at the beginning, men are almost equally likely as women to take part. Barn dancing originated from the ceilidh in Scotland and Ireland and contra dancing in England, events which brought the community together for a rollicking good time.

Perhaps the distinguishing feature between types of dance is whether they are communal or performed in pairs. I went to see an Irish step dance performance recently, and part of the pleasure of watching it was the synchronicity, the perfect unanimity of those pounding feet. Watching people dancing as a group can be thrilling.

Of course, a pas de deux can be thrilling too, or watching Fred and Ginger, or watching a single incredible dancer like Baryshnikov. But that kind of dance demands excellence with the dancers on display, and judged, as in “Dancing with the Stars.” There’s something egalitarian about square dancing, or step dancing, or the haka. We can all do it, women, men, children, seniors, and it’s fun.

Go to orangeenvironment.org for Barn Dance details.

Tags: barn dance, gibbs, step dancing

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