[00:16] Greer: 
Hi, this is Greer, your host for Femammal, the podcast that holds space for women to explore what it means to live well in our bodies and celebrates moving through this world as female mammals. Allison Jones has been contra dancing for almost a decade. She has taught the lesson for beginners at community contra dances for six years, and she is a past president of the board of Louisville Country Dancers, the nonprofit that sustains contra dancing in Louisville, Kentucky. In this conversation, she reflects on the body confidence that she developed through contra dancing and how that has translated into social confidence and joy in her body both on and off the dance floor.

[01:08] Greer: 
Welcome, Allison. I'm looking forward to our conversation about contra dancing, which is how we became friends, and it has been such a location of joyful movement in my life. I think growing up, I was a person who thought that I hated exercise, and it turns out what I hated was organized sports.

[01:31] Allison: 
That's fair. Yeah. I have always liked dancing, but I think we're told from a pretty young age that you have to be good at it in order to do it, like most things. And so if you don't think you're good at it or don't take classes, then you get to pretend to disco on the middle school dance floor. But contra is a totally different ballgame from what most people think of when you say, I like to dance.

[02:00] Greer: 
Yeah. I was completely self conscious about dancing until I came to contra dance. So for the listeners who don't know what contradance is, can you please explain?

[02:10] Allison: 
Yes. So best thing I can say is imagine Regency Jane Austin holding hands across sets with partners and then add square dance music and square dance speed, because it started out in England, but then came to Appalachia and had a revival. And so it's a lot of swing your partner and Do-si-Do and laughing and clapping and lots of stomping and bluegrass music, but also any kind of music that works for I think it's 64 beats.

[02:44] Greer: 
Yeah.

[02:44] Allison: 
And then eight minutes. Thank your partner, find a new one. Get in line again. Do it again.

[02:51] Greer: 
It's a blast.

[02:51] Allison: 
It's a blast.

[02:52] Greer: 
And many communities are very intergenerational contra dance communities as well.

[02:58] Allison: 
I think most populations tend older, meaning 50s up through 80s or 90s. We have 80 birthdays often, but we also have high schoolers college students early 30s. There's definitely, like, a gap in the middle where people seem to be busy with family at home, but when you have the younger population and the older population, everybody dances with everybody, and it's a community dance. Like, people show up with their partner, but they dance with everyone else, too. So it's definitely a big mixing of the community.

[03:39] Greer: 
Yeah. I love all those elements, and I love it when those people who loved contra dancing when they were younger step away for a moment because they have young children and then eventually come back with those children who are now tall enough to dance, right? And it's really not about being old enough to dance. It's mostly just being tall enough that someone sees you when you dance up to them in the line.

[03:58] Allison: 
Well, and some people show up with baby bjorns. Some people have danced, pregnant people have danced. People have toddlers on their back like that. It's not common. It's exhausting. But I've definitely danced a dance, where we passed a toddler between me and my partner. So it was three of us dancing. We can make it work.

[04:19] Greer: 
I love it. So you came to contradance several years before I did, and I remember showing up at our local contradance in Louisville, and you just struck me as such a confident person on the dance floor and also just a confident person broadly in life. You had not just a lot of dance confidence and body confidence, but also social confidence.

[04:47] Allison: 
Okay.

[04:47] Greer: 
And I just marveled at that because you were a few years younger than me, and I wanted that kind of confidence, and I didn't understand where it came from. So where does it come from?

[04:57] Allison: 
That's so funny. Well, I do now, but contra has changed me as a person. When I came to contra, I was not a confident person for a while. It was an act. I think it was knowing that these people don't know me in real life. Contra Allison is different from other Allisons, and I would dress up for contra dance because they don't know what I usually wear. Like, I would wear different clothes. I would wear makeup. But also, the physicality of contra was something that I hadn't really experienced before. I played softball, and I was okay at softball. I played basketball, and I was tall. But I'm good at contra dancing, and other people let me know it, which I think is what helped. Early on, I got people that I wasn't dancing with coming up to me after and saying, it's a joy to watch you dance. And I was just like, there's people watching me, and they like it. I have not now, but used to stage fright of sorts, like performance anxiety. I would not want people watching me. But while you're spinning and dancing and having fun, you can see other people having fun. And I don't know. I have been told that I'm intimidating. That was something I heard a lot in the beginning. Contra allison also became business Allison and so once you learn the moves, I took it as a challenge to do it thoroughly, like dance, but dance with your mouth closed so you're not breathing on your partner because it's cardio like you're exercising. And for a while, I would smile with my lips open so that I could breathe through my teeth and I could hide it. And the first day that I could dance with my mouth shut, I was just like, yes, I've made it as a Contra dancer, I can smile but not breathe through my mouth. So it started out as an act, to answer your question. But I got on the board, which gave me not just fake power, but real power is sort of at least presumed authority and responsibility. And so I just became someone that people recognized and someone that got stuff done. But also I would teach the lesson. And I was there every week. And when you practice something every week for a long time, you tend to get better at it. And I got better at it.

[07:33] Greer: 
So you talked about learning how to dance with your mouth closed. I have never once thought about what position my mouth is in.

[07:41] Allison: 
Oh, Greer, I'm so sorry.

[07:42] Greer: 
No, and I probably won't because honestly, my usual experience at a good contra dance is that I am grinning so broadly that my face hurts. So I don't think I could do anything other than whatever it is I'm doing with my mouth. But your comment makes me think about one of the great things about contradance is the moves themselves are very simple and straightforward, easy to learn. There is no footwork. You are just walking in time to the music. And because of that, it opens up this amazing space for self expression through flourishes and through style and simply through the energy that you bring to the dance and to your partner or to the neighbors you meet as you make your way up the line. And that was something that I think began to give me more confidence because other types of dance I would worry a lot whether I was doing it wrong. Did I have the right foot in the right place or the type of dancing that you would do in a bar or at a college dance where it's just very contemporary music. I would have no idea what to do with my body. But I feel like contra dance gave me a framework, and it was a framework that allowed for a lot of self expression and allowed me to tap into the energy I was experiencing in my body and share that in such an authentic way.

[09:06] Allison: 
Yeah, that makes sense. It's also very forgiving because it's very repetitive. You learn at max, like eight moves, and then it repeats again for almost eight minutes. So if you mess up for the first four minutes, you're probably going to get it in the second half. And those moves have time and space in them that you can play. And learning how to play is probably the best thing that I've gotten from dancing, because the caller tells you what to do and everybody does it. It's the group synchronicity. That's why I started coming and stayed, because I love groups like that. I love choir, I love things like that. But finding out that it was okay to do things that are a little bit different depending on who you're dancing with. You might do a high swing instead of a low swing. You might go faster, you might go slower. You see somebody that you haven't seen in a while and you might just hug them instead of swing them. It's very forgiving. It's very forgiving in the moves, but it's also very forgiving in how you interact with other people and also how you express yourself. So some people dance the same way every time and you know what to expect when you meet them. And so if I was swinging with you, we have our common interaction, but the person behind you might be totally different. And so it's very nice to know that you can physically meet people in different ways without verbally communicating any of this. It's just, I don't know, color overlay. Like you just meet different lights and you just make different colors.

[10:49] Greer: 
And there's a lot of physical boundary setting, which is really neat. I think our culture has more recently started having more open conversations about how do you set physical boundaries and how do you communicate physical boundaries. And I don't think I had much of an intuition about that before I started contra dancing. But then I did learn what it was like to be in a line and dance with someone I was really close friends with. And so dance maybe in a more exuberant way, a more expressive way, versus to dance maybe the next encounter I had with someone that I've never met before. And I might dance in a little bit more of a reserved way until I'm acquainted with how they dance and how I feel like they're perceiving me and how I perceive them. Because safety is important. Physical safety is important and emotional safety is important. And like any venue, there are going to be people who maybe don't respect your boundaries or just have a very different expectation about what the baseline physical interaction should be. So learning how to set some boundaries just through physical cues was really helpful.

[12:09] Allison: 
Yeah, that's interesting because the lesson sets up that your baseline should be professional and friendly. When you meet people in the frame, it's all upper body, it's all shoulders and arms and hands. And when you get to know someone, you can relax into a looser, more eventually intimate depending on how well you know them, but just less stiff, even contact because you're touching people. Yeah, it's so funny to think about how because there's music happening, there's a caller happening, so much of what happens in the dance is nonverbal. And so I meet new people with high frame. I think that might be why people thought I was intimidating. She's smiling with their lips shut and she's got a very high straight frame, like she's by the book. But I did that because I liked establishing this is where we start and this is where you meet me. And then if I know someone, then you literally relax into dancing with them. But if someone puts their hand in the wrong spot, most of the time they're being lazy. They're not necessarily trying to do something they shouldn't be doing. But you can stiffen your shoulders or straighten up a little bit and you'll see their eyes go, oh. And then they'll fix their hand sometimes. And feeling confident enough to fix other people because they're touching you. And you have that authority to assert your bubble of space, especially when someone's entering it with permission or blanket permission, basically, for the room, because you're interacting with everyone in the line, basically. So some people view that very cautiously, but they're very intimidated at the idea that everyone in the room is going to be touching them. But if it's understood that everyone is to be polite and everyone is to keep things above board and everyone is to follow the structure, then it's a lot easier when someone starts to slip to very gently point out, this isn't how you do that. And they'll almost always correct. And being able to assert yourself in a safe space to have something to push back to. If you're going to a bar and someone approaches you, you don't have a baseline for what is classically understood to be the appropriate interaction. If someone's hand is on your shoulder in the wrong spot, you were told where to put it at the beginning, like, this is where your hand goes.

[14:57] Greer: 
There was a lesson.

[14:58] Allison: 
There was a lesson. There's always like a home to come back to, if that makes sense. Like all the pieces have their place, the puzzle pieces fit. This is the base puzzle piece. And then if you're building something with someone that, you know, maybe you move the pieces around, but the framework is so consistent that you can settle into it and not lose anything by just doing the basic.

[15:26] Greer: 
It also gave me a great sense of, okay, the partner I'm dancing with right now or the neighbor I'm dancing with right now, is initiating something, offering something. It is always my option to follow that or to decline that. So if I'm feeling dizzy and I don't want to do the extra twirl that they have offered me by raising their hand, I simply won't do that extra twirl. And that's absolutely my right. And it gave me a greater sense of body sovereignty because of that. Or if there's someone who has made me uncomfortable in the past and I feel like they are doing that intentionally, I stop making eye contact with that person. I like to make eye contact. I like to smile at my partner, but I definitely use facial cues to convey to a partner, if I'm not comfortable with that person and if I'm just tolerating them, and I'm not going to follow anything special that they might try to lead, which.

[16:25] Allison: 
Is relying on the framework. Again, if the framework is the understood baseline of what you give to everyone. If you start taking those pieces away, it becomes very obvious that you are withholding things that they might take as a given, which is going to draw their attention to the fact that, oh, I'm not even being presented with a usual encounter; something's off. Consent is the word that I'm coming to, but like permission aspect of it. We teach in the lesson that all twirls are optional. They might not look like they're optional from the outside, but we want to equip everyone to know that just because the door is open doesn't mean you have to go through it. And that, I think, is maybe difficult for people to fully get when they're new, because they see everyone going through the door and they're like, well, this is what's expected of me. So we try to communicate very clearly, you don't have to. This is going to make you dizzier. And if a partner is being considerate, they won't push you to do a whole lot because you're still getting your feet under you. Being able to communicate to your partner verbally sometimes, oh, I need to slow down. Oh, let's not do any more twirls, or oh, that move, don't do that again. Some of it's even nonverbal, like the weight of someone's hand, if they start to prompt you by raising their hand and yours up, you can let go, you can put your hand down. You can resist them putting their arm up. Like, there's tons of things that you can do that don't have to be the other people in the room hearing, oh, I don't want to do that. That's usually enough for it to not like you just keep going. Like the dance is still happening. There's no time to question yourself. Even if you're getting carried away, then that's okay. But if you have the time to think, I don't want to do that, you can physically just not do it. And the dance allows for that. Which is really nice to think that you don't have to even explain yourself if you don't want to. Now, if the person keeps prompting you for the thing that you're turning down and they're not getting it, that's when you verbally say, oh, I don't want to do that anymore, but you don't have to even say it. You can just do what you want and you're not lessening the interaction at all because everyone is dancing their own moves.

[19:01] Greer: 
Also, I love that image you offered of the door is open, but it's your choice to walk through it. Because like a lot of people, I was brought up with some patriarchal social norms that I brought with me onto the dance floor when I first started. So walking in and feeling insecure, I felt like I, as a woman, had to be asked to dance. I couldn't initiate that offer. I also felt like I was supposed to dance with a man. It didn't occur to me that a woman might ask me to dance. And it felt like I was supposed to follow their lead. Because the type of dancing I was more familiar with was something like ballroom dancing. Where there is a lead and a follow, someone who initiates moves and someone whose role it is to listen to those initiated moves and follow that lead. And this upended, contra dance upended all of those norms for me, because it was a space where anyone can dance with anyone, and the gender norms don't matter. You're not stuck with one particular role and there isn't a lead and a follow. There are just a role on the left side and a role on the right side. And how you approach a couple of moves, it really is only two or three will change based on whether you're on the left side or the right side. But walking into a space where those gender roles I had taken as a given got deconstructed was really powerful for me. Gave me a lot more sense of agency, gave me a broader sense of the type of social interactions that were open to me, because I love dancing with you and a lot of other women across the age spectrum, and it would not have occurred to me to do that probably in the first three to six months that I was dancing.

[20:53] Allison: 
It's very funny how Contra has shifted for me, because when I first started, I started regularly going in 2013, where I went like, every week. And I first came to Contra kind of on accident, and it looked much more traditional than it was, but because it was old timey music, old timey structure, all the ladies were wearing skirts, or most of them were. There's like a hootin and hollering, and it feels old. It feels classic and traditional. And so I liked that because I've always been tall for my age, I've always been a bigger girl. And I basically flunked out of dance and gymnastics when I was younger. And so I leaned into the sports, the things where being bigger was good. Basketball, softball, and walking into a space where the default was almost like when I say I dress up, I, like, wore dresses for the first time. I first started dancing at Contra, wearing jeans, which don't ever do that, people who are listening, but because that was what I was wearing, that's what I showed up to dance in, and it was too hot. And so I realized skirts were not just allowed, but encouraged. They're more fun, they're flowy. I had to find skirts to wear. And so beginning dancer Allison dressed high femme. And so I used contra as an opportunity to be the most feminine version of myself I had ever been. And I was grace, and I was beauty, and I was a delight and also scary, apparently. And that was like my first encounter with Contra. But just as you say with the roles and being able to dance on the left and the right. I was twirling three or four twirls per encounter. I was doing a lot, I was tiring myself out and at some point we had more women than men and I needed a partner and I'm tall. So I asked another lady to dance and some of my guy friends wanted to twirl and I was like oh great, you can do it. I'll do the part where you don't have to spin. And so being able to shift and realize oh, I can still wear high femme stuff if I want, everybody can wear a skirt and people do. But after I got confident with the more feminine side, I realized that contra let you do both. And so I can still show up in a dress and makeup and red lipstick and heavy eyeliner and I can dance on the left where I'm twirling other ladies. And I am facilitating them, doing all the fancy moves that I learned how to do. And I am being the structure that they can rely on. And that is also confidence. Being able to dance both lets you experience the full dance and also experience the other dancers. Like if you only dance one side, you only dance with half the people unless they swap and then you might get lucky. But for me it's very funny to start out not wearing dresses, wearing dresses for contra, weaning into that and then still leaning into it, but presenting in the more masculine role. Even though it's not masculine, it's just the classically determined like this is what the dudes do.

[24:51] Greer: 
Because historically men danced on the left and historically women danced on the right.

[24:56] Allison: 
Right? But you could have a line full of ladies. It's not required that you do anything. It's not required that you twirl. The twirling is optional. I thought it was extra fun and so I did it. It's been very interesting. Like I started dancing in shorts again recently because it was just like I've worn all my skirts already, like I want to wear something else. And it's been a wild ride for sure.

[25:26] Greer: 
I was doing a bit of a visual inventory of that progression of how people present and dance when I was at Cumberland Dance Week. So it's this awesome week-long summer camp that is intergenerational and all about contra dance and other music and performance, but mainly contra dance and the dances at night because it's intergenerational, there would be everything from babies to people in their 70s and you would see the tween and teenage girls made up to the nines wearing gorgeous dresses that you could tell were hot and uncomfortable and didn't move well. But they were very excited to be presenting themselves in that way. And then anyone my age and older, so like the 30 somethings and up, we were clearly just dancing for maximum comfort and also maximum twirl. In our skirts, you wear the most flared out skirt you can so that when you spin on one toe, you see it all the way twirl out so that it's just this flat circle around you.

[26:41] Allison: 
It's very funny to think about what is desirable dance fashion and how that shifted, because I know exactly what you mean with those teenagers. It's very much like school dance ball scenario. You got to dress up and present and then these dance weekends that we go to where you're dancing for hours and hours and hours. People wear athletic wear in the middle. Like, they'll wear athletic wear tops, and they'll wear skirts. Like people wear sneakers and skirts. Like, the fashion is also super functional. I definitely had to downgrade the type of shoe that I wore when I started because they were a fashion dance shoe, not a function dance shoe. And at some point I realized nobody's looking at my feet, and if they are, too bad. Like, my feet hurt. So I went from dressing up to dressing for contra, which turned into a lot more tiedye flowy like tank tops. I don't know. I feel like the kinds of things that people wear to contra, they exist in the real world, but the concentration of I just don't feel like I see what the old ladies wear to contra out in the real world, you know what I mean? Like contra old lady attire is its own thing, and I don't think I see that, but maybe I just don't pay attention.

[28:11] Greer: 
I shifted to wearing volleyball shorts under my short, flared out skirts, and I shifted to wearing sports bras under my tops because that was way more comfortable, because it's basically a sport set to music. And I dance in tennis shoes all the time, like running shoes that have a cut up sock pulled over the toes so that I can spin better. And I never would have thought that that was fashionable, socially acceptable, or fashionable. Yeah.

[28:44] Allison: 
So I started out in jeans. I was very self conscious about my legs. I would wear opaque black tights when I started wearing skirts because I wanted to wear skirts, but I didn't want anyone to see me because that was the issue, was being seen. And so I went with really long skirts. They got too warm. I was like, okay, if I wear shorter skirts, I need to wear tights. So I'd wear tights no matter what time of year it was. It got too hot. But at some point, I realized that comfort trumped aesthetics, because when people were watching me, they weren't watching me because of what I was wearing. They were watching me because I was good. I was even thinking before, when I think of a good dancer, do I think about what they have? I have no idea what my favorite dancers wear on a regular basis. Mine is one guy who wears very flashy shirts, but like everybody wears flashy shirts. The fashion of Contra is loud and comfortable and functional and realizing that you can dress up, but it doesn't have to be what's like, I don't know, in magazines or you could get away at the mall. Your audience is different. Your audience is people that prioritize the physicality of dancing. So if it looks great, great. But just like you said, the shorts under the skirt, switching out the tops, like, whatever is more comfortable is way more important than anything else. And that was reassuring for me when appearances, no matter what they felt like, had been kind of what had been pushed on me before as wear shapewear to make it look better. Don't worry about what it feels like. The shoes that look good, don't worry what they feel like, hairstyles, whatever. If it's uncomfortable, too bad. You have appearances to maintain. That doesn't happen at Contra. If it feels good, great. That's it.

[31:03] Greer: 
This shift towards body positivity keeps bubbling up in our conversation and I love that because what I'm hearing from you and what my own experience has been is that fundamentally on the dance floor, it is about the energy that you bring to the dance. The energy that you bring and have with whichever partner you're dancing with in the moment and everything else has a chance to fall away. The fact that I brush 6ft tall and that used to make me feel insecure, especially in a dance scenario, falls away. It does not matter that I might be a foot taller than the person I'm dancing with. It is just about the energy and the joy that I am bringing to that encounter and some of those other struggles that people have with body shape not matching what our culture currently says is the right shape, or even disability status or physical handicaps that might be frustrating on a daily basis. Can you speak to some of that as well? How the way that there's a variety of options for entering into moves and entering into interactions opens dance up to more people?

[32:19] Allison: 
Sure. So just like you can add more to the dance with flourishes and swapping and play and make it more complicated if you have the time and the ability, you can simplify dances to the point that you're walking to the beat and in the right place in the set at the right time. You don't have to twirl, you don't have to do all the motions. You can cut whole sections out to make sure that you're in the right place at the right time. And if you have a bad knee, if there's something wrong with your foot, we've had people dance with arms and calves and broken collarbones. They probably shouldn't have been. But the dance is so forgiving in both directions and also the community is so forgiving. We know that you can't always be perfect. There's no expectation of perfect. We know that new people especially are going to need a lot of help. And so if the person that needs a lot of help isn't new, it doesn't change anything. The support of the community carries people through the dance, sometimes literally. And there's still joy in that because the thing about contra is the connection with people. And so leaning on someone is just more connection. Like, you may not be doing it at the tempo that everyone else is. There might be people around you that are going faster and spinning and doing all these extra things that the dance doesn't call for, but they can do it. There's no comparison and there's no standard that you have to meet because the point of the dance is to be moving together. And as long as you're moving together, you're dancing. That's the simplest thing. Technically, the calls are a suggestion, right? Everyone needs the calls to start out because you want us to be moving in the same direction so we don't collide with each other. But at a certain point the caller drops out and people keep doing what they think they're supposed to be doing. That's all you need is just people moving to music and touching each other and sometimes leaning on each other or redirecting people and some of that's nonverbal. You can simply just scoot someone in the right direction, put their hand in a different place. It's very like feng shui. If you redirect the new people, sometimes there's not enough time for them to hear what you say and process and do it. Right. You just figure out how to guide them. Like you're pushing a boat into the water. Right. Just go that way. Right. Just like channel them in your mind. But also just like, I don't know, I'm a new person wrangler.

[35:29] Greer: 
I love to watch you do that. And I've learned a lot from you because with just the gentlest touch or with a simple one finger pointing in one direction at the right moment, you get someone to the right place, sometimes without a physical interaction. And what you're describing, I think, is at the foundation of this being such an intergenerational dance community. Because you could have an older person whose shoulder is really stiff. They have a big problem with that. But there is a way to change the swing to make it more comfortable for that person. Or I'm remembering a moment at Cumberland Dance Week where a kid who was maybe six years old and less than half my size danced up to me. And so we just did a two handed swing and we could reach that way. We didn't need to worry that that kid was never going to be able to reach my shoulder to put their hand on my shoulder.

[36:29] Allison: 
You just modify.

[36:30] Greer: 
Yeah. And it's beautiful because it's affirming, especially if you're the person who at that moment is experiencing a physical limitation. It is so affirming to dance up to someone who smiles at you and finds a way to incorporate you into that dance.

[36:51] Allison: 
One of the things that I did early on when I was going hard and spinning a lot, there was a dance where the ladies were in the middle and they would swing out like spin and twirl to their new neighbor. So this is someone that wasn't someone that I had danced with yet. This is a new encounter in the line. And I'm twirling fast enough that I'm not spotting. I'm expecting them to catch me and they caught me every time because that is how the dance goes. They know that I'm coming to them and they just received me. But just in that way it could have been some other thing happening. I could have been not twirling because the structure is there and you know what to expect. It takes a lot for something to happen where you can't compensate for it. You can see other people in the room you might identify in the next set before they even get to you that there might like you can sometimes see not a disturbance in the force but you can almost feel the ripple of there's modification happening near you and you're almost prepped ahead of time for it. But even if you're not, you have enough time to recover. One of the things that I do to help new people is I signal early. There's time in the dance where the caller gives you lead time to do the thing so you have time to listen and do the thing. But a lot of times I will cue hands where hands go before they need to be. I will almost signal flare or what do you call it? Semaphore. I'll semaphore my body in the place that it should be. A lot of times before I need to be there as a way of grounding the set. And so if you have time to anticipate and you have time to see what's coming, you have all the time in the world to help anyone that needs helping, whether they're an experienced dancer or not. Some people get turned around. I get turned around sometimes. Every once in a while I turn around. I'm facing the wrong way, but you just keep turning. There are mistakes in the sense that you're not doing what the caller is telling you. But I don't do what the caller tells me to do all the time. So you just make it work.

[39:29] Greer: 
It's so fun to be part of a collaborative intergenerational community like that. I feel like contra dance is the reason that I have friends who are baby boomers. How else would I wind up being a peer to baby boomers? But we are peers on the dance floor and that's so helpful. I need especially women who are a generation ahead of me who are having fun with me on the dance floor and then also sharing their lives with me off the dance floor and I am so inspired by seeing the tweens and teenagers who show up on the dance floor. I envy the confidence that they already have in their bodies because they are already dancing this way that I didn't get until I was ten or 20 years older than they are.

[40:19] Allison: 
Imagine if we had started contra dancing as teenagers, Greer. We would be unstoppable.

[40:26] Greer: 
Unstoppable on the dance floor, but also in life. I mean, I find myself sometimes on the edge of tears on the dance floor when I dance up to a 15 year old girl who makes perfect eye contact with me, gives me a perfect frame, gives me really good tension, and we have a fantastic dance interaction and do some fun flair in that move. And then she dances off. And I just think she knows her body, she's confident in her body and she feels it. You can feel it.

[41:05] Allison: 
Yeah.

[41:05] Greer: 
She is moving with joy in her body through this music and she's going to take that with her out into the world. And I want that for everyone. So I'm glad that you and I got it eventually. I wish we had gotten it earlier.

[41:18] Allison: 
You see it happen even in a single night. The new people at the--because I teach the lesson a lot--you have people before they've seen what a real dance looks like, come in, learn the vocabulary, learn the words, learn the moves. And they're nervous, like they're afraid they're going to get it wrong. They're afraid everyone's going to be looking at them. Everybody knows two left feet, blah, blah, blah. And the contra has such an easy threshold if you can walk and chew gum, it's like that kind of thing. If it's the hokey poke, I mean, that's it. That's not the fun way to say it anyway. But at the break you can see that people have either decided this isn't for them or they love it. They love it because contra is so different from what the rest of life is. It's so different from how you usually interact with other people and they're having fun and they didn't think they were going to have fun. Like the same people who were nervous 45 minutes ago are feeling successful and they're feeling good about doing something for the first time and interacting with people who have been doing this for years. Like to walk into a setting where other people have been doing it for possibly 40 years and to think that you could keep up with them, you do. And that's very affirming and satisfying. And also they know that there's more dancing coming. That's always the thing is like, oh, there's a whole second half, we get to do this again. It's great.

[42:59] Greer: 
So just as we wind down this conversation and maybe contra dancing won't be everyone's cup of tea, I hope women find any way that gives them that sense of confidence in their body and that joy that we get out of this activity. But what has that confidence done for you off the dance floor and out in the world in your life?

[43:18] Allison:
It's made a huge difference in how I carry myself. I've always been tall. I was never one of those tall people that slouched. But I definitely felt like I took up more space than I was supposed to for a long time. And at dancing and with contra, knowing that not only am I a good dancer, but I'm a good teacher, I'm a good partner. The place that I exist in is good, and the body that I exist in is good and worthy and admirable. People admire me, and it's not just because I can breathe with my mouth shut while I dance. The physical expression of myself through space and time is great and memorable. People from other cities know who I am, not because I've talked to them, but because they've danced near me. They know who I am because of how I dance, is a remarkable thing to remember about yourself, and I took that into other social settings. I would think of myself as taking Contra Allison out into the world, because just like I was going into contra where these people don't know me. You go out into the world where people don't know you. Why do they have to meet other Allison? They can meet contra Allison. Just like I was putting on a show for contra. I can take contra and take it out into the world. It's not a show anymore. I feel so much better about who I am, not just as a personality, because contra and my position in the community has helped me develop social skills that I didn't have and didn't try to develop outside of dancing. I cared about dancing, so I developed those skills. But just even the physical, walking into a room full of strangers, I don't know. I do that all the time now. I do that all the time. And it's my room. This is my space. Why can't I do that in a different building? And so I do. And I just remember how amazing I am. Like, I don't know what else to say. It's so nice to feel comfortable in my body and realize that it doesn't have to just be one building in my city. It can be everywhere.

[46:03] Greer: 
That's gorgeous. Thank you.

[46:10] Greer: 
If today's episode resonated with you, I'd love to hear from you. You can email me at femammalpodcast@gmail.com. That's femammalpodcast@gmail.com. You can also follow this podcast on Facebook. Just search for Femammal Podcast, and you will find a community of people who are interested in living well in our bodies. And, of course, I'd love for you to rate this podcast and leave a review wherever you download your podcasts. Until next time, be well.