Mixers at Contra Dances
At BIDA, the contra dance I help organize, as part of our caller welcome document we encourage callers to program a mixer early in the evening. In a mixer, instead of keeping the same partner for the duration of a dance, you switch partners each time through the choreography.
In my experience mixers tend to be unpopular with experienced dancers. It doesn’t help that callers often introduce mixers with a bait-and-switch, asking dancers to find a partner, then announcing that the dance will be a mixer, but I think that’s not the only reason. I suspect experienced dancers enjoy them less because it gives them less time to connect with a particular partner—something they might really value. They also tend to be simpler dances, more beginner friendly, with fewer opportunities to exercise advanced dancer skills.
I called a “scatter mixer” at BIDA last night in the third slot of the evening (Chris Page’s “Accretion Reel”). This was partially to solve a calling problem I’ve been experiencing recently and partially to assess whether I stand by our advice to callers. Conclusion: I stand by it and, while they may not be the most stimulating dances for experienced contra dancers, they serve some important community functions:
They split up beginner-beginner couples
This is the problem I initially set out trying to solve by programming a mixer. Beginners will often come to dances as a couple expecting to dance with each other, which is totally reasonable! But it makes it much more likely that, without an experienced partner to help them, they’ll get lost in a dance, which can have cascading effects that, in a worst-case scenario, might cause the line they’re in to fall apart. When I notice couples like this in the hall I often adjust my program to call simpler dances, which is fine, but not my ideal! Contra dances also have a pretty strong culture of dancing with different people for each dance and I want to ensure new dancers learn that.
During the lesson, I encourage beginners to partner with other people, but they don’t always take that advice seriously. A mixer early in the evening can give them a bit of a push and pave the way for them to ask strangers to dance in the future. (They may still decide to pair up after that or they may sit out the mixer, but I figure it’s at least good encouragement.)
I’m not sure if it was the mixer or just the particular crowd last night, but I didn’t notice many beginner-beginner couples after that dance.
They introduce you to a lot of people
Along similar lines, I think a mixer early in the evening can help integrate people new to a community. It lets dancers build up a group of people who they notice a nice dance connection with and clears the way to ask them to dance later in the evening. This is the rationale BIDA explicitly uses in our caller welcome (“to help people meet and dance with new faces”).
They’re unserious
Experienced dancers can get very serious about their contra dances! There’s a lot of room in contra for people to show off practiced skills—precision, timeliness, the right amount of weight, flourishes, correctness. And there’s a lot of contra choreography that can get pretty interesting and cerebral! Mixers on the other hand tend to be very simple, with loose timing. They’re often a bit goofy. It feels to me like good community vibes.
While I do love showing off my Very Good Well Honed contra dancing skills as much as the next cool hip dancer, I think it’s also nice to have a moment to embrace that dancing is messy and goofy! Moving your body to music, connecting with other people—this is fun, even if you’re not doing it in a high-skill way! (I really enjoyed watching Jeff call the family dance earlier in the evening for similar reasons.) I think this is particularly true of scatter mixers—where you have to run around looking for a partner, always a bit of a silly feeling—but I think it’s a little true of other mixers as well.