Archive for the ‘Musings on Dancing’ Category:
Cowboys and Morris Dancers
I love the Transatlantic Acoustic Show. It’s a chick from New York and a quirky Britishman exchanging witty banter and they play wonderful indie folk music. It’s one of the very few podcasts that I listen to.
Anyway, in one of their older shows (#56, from 12/8/2007), which I just listened to while driving back home from a conference, they talked about Morris dancing. They talked about how Youtube and parts of the internet could make people think that everyone in England is a Morris dancer and that men dancing with bells on their legs while hitting sticks together is as British as the Queen. Similarly, cowboys are the American icons that the media makes everyone else in the world think that cowboys are everywhere in America herding cattle.
Sadly, it’s neither the case that England is filled with Morris dancers and America is filled with cowboys. But wouldn’t it be awesome if those statements were true? Is there a correlation between people who think that cowboys are awesome and people who think that Morris dancers are awesome? Huh?
Subscribe to the comments for this postLadies Chained
Let me explain the title of this weblog. If you are familiar with contra or square dancing you probably giggled when you first saw the domain name or the title of this site. If you aren’t, then you probably were expecting to see examples of domestic abuse or erotic photos of damsels in distress. Sorry, neither of those things are available here.
“The Ladies Chained”, or simply “ladies chained”, is a pun on the ladies’ chain, a figure in contra and square dancing. Two couples face each other before performing this figure. The ladies of both couples will eventually end up in the others’ place. Then, depending on what you consider a ladies’ chain should be, they either stop there or “chain back”. That is, they perform the exact same figure to get back to their original starting place.