Positional Calling should become the default

Dancing for Those Who Come After

Another Chippenham festival has drawn to a close, and the town has settled back into its natural stillness. There's something almost dreamlike about this rhythm—for most of the year, Chippenham exists in peaceful hibernation amongst its weathered stone buildings and quiet streets. Then the festival arrives, and for four extraordinary days, Island Park becomes the town's beating heart. Music spills through the air, people flow like rivers through the streets, everything awakens. When it ends and the task force packs away, it's like watching the town drift back into a long, contented slumber.

I was buzzing after Chippenham in 2024, and I feel that same surge of energy now. Dance festivals like this are extended journeys of pure connection—every day becomes about the elemental bonds between band and caller, music and movement, you and the person across from you. Nothing else exists. You drink until the small hours, sing in pubs until your voice grows hoarse, stumble about sleep-deprived, pay absurd prices for mediocre food, and treasure every moment of it.

Chippenham draws an older crowd compared to IVFDF, which happens at universities each year. This creates a fascinating tension around calling styles. The older dancers prefer "Ladies and Gents," whilst the younger crowd doesn't. I learnt contra to "Larks and Robins"—and I think I was mistaken in a previous post to frame this as leading and following. There's no inherent hierarchy in these roles; you simply do what feels right, provided it's more joyful than disruptive.

Yet when Chippenham callers use "Ladies and Gents," I find it strangely disorienting. My brain doesn't process the calls as swiftly, and I enjoy the dancing far less. The curious thing is, the older crowd feels precisely the same way about Larks and Robins. The unfamiliar terms throw them off, and combined with generally struggling to keep pace anyway, they retreat into what they know. It's this peculiar mirror—we're all bewildered by each other's language, all somewhat lost when the calling doesn't match what our minds expect.

There's now extensive literature on solving this calling puzzle. Positional calling is one approach—essentially calling using spatial terms instead of role terms. The downside is that your phrasing becomes more cumbersome. You might need to say something like "those with their left hands free, allemande." But beyond that, it's actually a delightful challenge to translate dances written with gendered terms and work out how to plant the moves in people's minds without them.

This is genuinely difficult. Take this dance I really struggled to call without role terms:

As If: A1 - 16: ladles start a hey - rights in centre, lefts on ends - until gentlespoons meet - gentlespoons ricochet first time, ladles ricochet second time - continue hey until opposite home side

A2 - 16: partners balance & swing

B1 - 8: balance & petronella, face next neighbours and form a ring 8: balance & petronella

B2 - 4: long lines forward 4: ladles roll away partners with a half sashay backing up 8: ladles start a half hey - rights in centre, lefts on ends

I'm not claiming I've mastered positional calling, but my interpretation of the A1 goes something like this: ensure partners are connected, one with their right hand free passes by the right until the two neighbours who didn't start the hey meet in the middle and ricochet back. They retreat, the original two come back in and ricochet, then their partners go back in to finish the hey. The rest is fairly intuitive, though the roll away feels tricky too—those with their left hands pass in front of their partner to swap sides, which gives lovely momentum for the non-passing person to start the hey.

You can see this becomes rather wordy. It would be infinitely easier to use role terms.

Despite this complexity, I believe this is precisely the right challenge for contra dancing to embrace. We need to consider what sustainability looks like for this dance form—what world do we wish to create for young people stepping onto the dance floor for the first time?

I dream of newer dancers who can take hands four and never need to ask whether they're content on that side, because they've never been taught that it matters which side they're on. I dance to delight myself, yes, but I also dance to invite others into this joy. The dance shouldn't cater to me specifically—it should open its arms to welcome the rest of the world.

Positional calling is how we achieve this. I now believe all callers should default to it. No more birds. No more genders. We should be able to simply dance, and clearly we can.

I hope my children one day get to experience contra and feel completely welcomed, whoever they are. This will require some grace from the older generation. At Chippenham, I heard a dancer mutter after a Lark and Robin dance: "If you change, don't expect the world to change around you." I understand the sentiment, but it breaks my heart a little—because isn't that exactly what we should hope for? That our small changes ripple outward, creating space for more people to discover joy in this tradition?

I don't want positional calling used as a trick—bamboozling people who prefer gendered terms into dancing without realising. I want it used with clear intention: things must evolve, and they must evolve to keep the tradition breathing. Contra, squares, Playford—no form of folk dance is immune to this need for growth.

You dance for yourself, and for those who come after. Not merely for yourself.