Contra dancing: energetic, fun, flirty

Mike Cottle has had a lot of hobbies over the past 20 years, but contra dancing is one of the few that stuck.

Cottle, a professor of music technology at the University of Utah, took up contra dancing about 15 years ago in Illinois, where contra dancing is bigger than it is in Utah. He was a new person in a new town, he said, and he figured taking up a new hobby was a great way to meet people. Already a dancer (he had done swing and ballroom dance), he decided contra dancing could be that new hobby.

"I was immediately hooked," he said.

The same is true for Cara Lingstuyl. She said when she moved to Utah from New York in 1997, her boss invited her to a contra dance.

"I have not stopped dancing since," she said.

And for Brenda Goodwin, the president of Wasatch Contras and organizer of the dance held every third Saturday at the Columbus Community Center in Salt Lake, the story is much the same. She said she played Renaissance and Medieval instruments, and went to a festival in 1993 where she was going to be playing these instruments. But there was contra dancing going on, she said, so she tried it. She put the instruments under a chair and there they stayed for the rest of the festival. She continued attending this festival for several years, each year bringing the instruments, but she said she never played them. Eventually, she just stopped bringing them altogether.

Almost everyone who tries contra dancing immediately falls in love with it, Cottle said — or they immediately don't like it. He said people like contra or don't like it for pretty much the same reasons. One, it is customary to change partners every dance, something he likes but might not be what a young married couple is looking for. Additionally, contra dancing is pretty friendly. While dancing, partners look each other in the eye. There's a lot of flirtation — meaningless flirtation but flirtation nonetheless. Some people don't like that.

Still, Cottle said the best part about contra dancing is that things that matter in real life — age, size, skill — just aren't factors on a dance floor. He said some of his favorite people to dance with are in their 70s, but children can also learn to dance and enjoy it.

Even for those who love to contra dance and do so often, it's a little hard to describe what exactly contra dancing is. Cottle and others who regularly contra dance compare it to square dancing but say that doesn't quite capture it. The two are very similar, but contra is more energetic and lacks the costumes and many of the rules tied to square dancing.