Dancing Queer History
In summer 2026 I’m the Social Practice Artist in Residence at Emmanuel College, Boston — where I’m working with dancers to create art that draws on embodied queer dance experience.
If you’re in the Boston area and you want to join in, send me a message!
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Sometimes scandalous, sometimes utopian, and sometimes the simple result of circumstance or opportunity, queer history hides in plain sight throughout the living tradition of Anglo-American social folk dance.
In this project, I offer a taste of the ways in which queerness pervades social folk dance in the long, living Playford tradition — just as it is ubiquitous in society itself. As a research project, Dancing Queer History operates in four modes: choreography, history, visual art, and language.
History
Throughout the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, dances were used to mark, allude to, or celebrate current events and popular culture. In other words, although the dance figures were generic and mostly described when published in terms of binary, heterosexual couples, the stories they told sometimes strayed intentionally far from that norm.
Choreography
Dance can be structurally queer or gender-bending, either by virtue of the performer or the choreography — and audiences from the 17th century to the 21st have embraced these experiments.
Language
Gender-free calling is increasingly the norm for social folk dancing around the world. I pioneered the use of positional calling for contra dance in the late 20-teens. Positional calling invites us to use what we know about dance structure, momentum, and flow to teach and call for diverse dancers effectively and efficiently.
Art
Inspired by historical dance diagrams and instructions that guided bodies through queer social landscapes from the seventeenth century onward, and in explicit refusal of the twentieth-century revivalists who sought to heteronormalize the archive of traditional dance, my artistic practice flips the archival script, using queer movement to create diagrams that document, rather than dictate, paths of dance-travel. In this way, the dance becomes an alternative archive that ceremonially re-centers queer experience in social dance history.
Choreography
Dance can be structurally queer or gender-bending, either by virtue of the performer or the choreography — and audiences from the 17th century to the 21st have embraced these experiments.
As a choreographer, I am interested in the way that we can use the emergent mechanics of modern contra dance to develop new conventions for ungendered dance choreography.
I call these new contras ‘Arky’, after a vernacular term used in the 1980s and 1990s to describe traditional figures danced from an unexpected position.
Visual Art
Inspired by historical dance diagrams and instructions that guided bodies through queer social landscapes from the seventeenth century onward, and in explicit refusal of the twentieth-century revivalists who sought to heteronormalize the archive of traditional dance, my artistic practice flips the archival script, using queer movement to create diagrams that document, rather than dictate, paths of dance-travel.
In this way, the dance becomes an alternative archive that ceremonially re-centers queer experience in social dance history.
History
Throughout the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, dances were used to mark, allude to, or celebrate current events and popular culture. In other words, although the dance figures were generic and mostly described when published in terms of binary, heterosexual couples, the stories they told sometimes strayed intentionally far from that norm.
This brief list of dances with queer connections indicates the range and breadth of this history.
Half Hannekin (1651)
Mad Robin (1686)
Emperor of the Moon (1690)
The Hole in the Wall (1696)
Mad Moll (1698)
The Woman’s the Man (1699)
The Female Saylor (1706)
The Fair Quaker of Deal (1718)
Three-Hand Reel (ca. 1790)
Something Different (before 1983)
Impropriety (1999)
Swing Both Ways (2019)
Kyriarky (2025)
Language
Gender-free calling is increasingly the norm for social folk dancing around the world, and there are various strategies that have been developed for different styles.
I pioneered the use of positional calling — calling without role terms of any kind — for contra dancing in the late 20-teens.
Positional calling invites us to use what we know about dance structure, momentum, and flow to teach and call for diverse dancers effectively and efficiently. Because it doesn’t call attention to binary dance roles, it encourages dancers to think expansively about their choices of where and with whom to dance — and it encourages callers to think beyond the binary frameworks that dominate turn-of-the-21st-century contra dancing.