Publicity
November 6, 2009
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Home on the Range
Dancers keep the music alive
By Janna Goerdt
HTF Staff Writer
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Harvesting apples all day wasn't enough of a New England experience for Jim Ganahl - he had to have the dancing, too. Ganahl, now 59, was in his early 30s and working in the Vermont apple orchards. After the picking was done for the day, he and just about every other Vermonter would gather at the town hall for a traditional contra dance - a kind of community dance that encourages mixing and mingling - and for the next several hours, they swung and twirled and sweated and got hooked on dancing.
Meanwhile, Carol Booth was delving into the dance tradition at the other end of the country. She was living and working in Seattle, an area with its own festival and dancing traditions. She, too, fell in love with the idea of a group of people coming together for a dance. "It was just plain fun," she said.
Years later, after Ganahl and Booth had met in Minnesota, they decided to bring New England dance traditions to the Iron Range. After connecting with a few other like-minded musicians from Ely to Chisholm, the Home on the Range community dance association was born and the contra dances began.
Deb Monacelli of Virginia was at the first Home on the Range dance, at the Tower Civic Center in January of 1998. She said the dance sounded like fun, but she wasn't quite sure what to expect.
"I felt kind of paranoid," Monacelli remembers. Ganahl said that's a common first reaction - and an understandable one. Being asked to step onto a bare dance floor with a bunch of strangers and listening for your cue to "all join hands and circle to the left" can be a little overwhelming at first. A traditional contra dance isn't like an Iron Range polka party, and it isn't exactly like a square dance. Historically, Ganahl said, contra dances were one way for local boys and girls to mix and mingle. Some dances call for the entire group to face each other in two long lines for a series of promenades and other steps, while other dances call for couples to circle around the dance floor, joining hands with other couples, breaking apart and coming back together again. By the end of the dance, every girl in the room would have met every other boy, Ganahl said.
"Once I went there, you realize that you don't have to know a thing," Monacelli said. The Home on the Range callers and musicians teach the steps to each dance, and if a dancer hops left when they should have swiveled right, well, that's OK, Monacelli said. The band also usually mixes a few waltzes and polka tunes onto a Home on the Range dance to keep things lively.
"We mess it up, but we have a ball doing it," she said. Today, Monacelli and her husband, Paul, make it to as many Home on the Range dances as they can, she said.
And they have tried to get other people to go to the dances - with "limited success," Deb Monacelli said. She wonders if it's because those new to community contra dances don't think simply gathering and dancing on a bare wooden floor can be fun.
"I think it's a different sort of world," she said. "I think people think their entertainment has to be a highly technical thing; there's a limit to the amount of people who are happy with simple things. But that's my favorite part about it, it's so simple."
"We like to keep the old-time music going," said Joan Lewandowski, who has also been going to Home on the Range dances since they began. "It's good for the family," Lewandowski said. "You can bring your kids...the people there are good, down-to-earth type people."
Keeping the Home on the Range dances going has been hard at times, Ganahl and Booth said. The couple now lives in Cook. A community contra dance will attract "about one percent of the population," also taking into account people who have scheduling conflicts, Ganahl said. For a place like the Tapestry Folkdance Center in Minneapolis, that means several hundred people at one of their regular community dances. In northern Minnesota, a dance might draw just 30 people, Ganahl said, and that might not be enough to reach the "critical mass" that's essential for a rip-roaring dance.
To play for a large group of dancers and to see them learning the steps, smiling and laughing as they circle the floor - that's satisfying, Booth said.
"If you're calling, playing, and watching the dance, it's like all one large piece that's flowing together," she said. "It's an exciting feeling."
Trying to capture that feeling has kept the Home on the Range dance band, officially called FriendsOnTheRange, going during the last decade, through hall-bursting dances and thinly-attended ones.
"We're working harder, playing less, and we aren't as happy as we used to be," Ganahl said. Part of keeping Home on the Range going is the "missionary aspect" of wanting to introduce more people to the simple fun of community dancing, he said.
The group also plays for individual house dances, parties and weddings, where more people are introduced to town hall-style dancing. Ganahl thinks such events are key to keeping the dance tradition alive.
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Home On The Range Community Dance Association
9067 East Wakemup Village Road
Cook, Minnesota 55723
218-666-5990
caroljim@lcp2.net
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