Creative Campus

UA TO PRESENT CONTRA DANCE COLLEGE NIGHT AT SMITH HALL  

Featuring Waxwing with caller Gary Nelson

(Tuscaloosa, Al) The University of Alabama’s Creative Campus, Natural History Museum, and Residence Hall Association are pleased to present a College Night Contra Dance at Smith Hall featuring the band Waxwing with caller Gary Nelson on Friday, February 10, 2012 from 7:30 pm – 10:30 pm. The event is free and open to the public and additionally sponsored by New College and the Blount Undergraduate Initiative.  For more information call 205-348-7884 or visit www.creativecampus.ua.edu. 

Contradance is a form of music and dance that involves a caller, and blends traditional styles with new twists, drawing new audiences. The contraband (also called Waxwing) that will be playing for the event is led by Robin Behn, a professor and the director of the MFA creative writing program here at the university. New contra dancers will have an opportunity to be taught how to contra dance by gentle, encouraging, skillful master-caller Gary Nelson who will have them all up and dancing very simple contra dances to Waxwing in a matter of minutes. A true American dance form that is wildly popular in cities and college towns across the country, it is an easy, welcoming, form of dance. It’s not a “partner” dance. Rather, everyone dances with everyone else over the course of the evening to a basic walking step, repeating simple patterns over and over. Anyone, even those utterly inexperienced or allergic to dance, even those traumatized by wedding waltzes, critical ballet teachers, or snide gym teachers from the past, can get over their dance phobia and love contra dancing. It’s easy, it’s great exercise, and it’s totally do-able the very first time by children, old people, and everyone in between. We hope to infect Tuscaloosa in an ongoing way with contra dance fever. 

Waxwing band’s motto is “Traditional Music Taking Flight.”  By “traditional music,” we mean a base of tunes passed down over hundreds of years from fiddler to fiddler in  Ireland, Appalachia, the Deep South, Quebec, New England and the Northwest, to name a few. By “taking flight” we mean that we start with these traditional tunes and then improvise on them, going off into musical regions as disparate as pop, jazz, reggae, classical and other places we aren’t sure of the name of. Like most traditional bands, Waxwing has a “bottom”—rhythm and chords providing the very changeable but always identifiable heartbeat of the band:  electric keyboard, eclectic percussion. These guys, Wayne and Shawn, will let you know when to tap your feet or keep you all together moving across a dance floor like a field of coordinated elks. Up above, two other voices. One is a  fiddle, a violin in disguise that is not always quite in disguise as Andrew dips in and out of his traditional and classical roots. And one more voice, winds: flute and—what is that little thing? —a brass penny whistle worth a bit more than a penny. The flute is haunting, lyrical, jazz-prone; the whistle will buy you a beer at a pub in Dublin with Robin.

Waxwing is a model of art-on-the-outside. Fiddle tunes are a form of folk, or outsider, art—most fiddlers can’t read music and never took a lesson. And for the whole band it’s a gig outside how we mostly spend our days.  Andrew Levin, when he isn’t stepping outside his main musical training to fiddle with us, is a professor of classical music, conducting the orchestra at Clemson University and playing viola in the Greensville Symphony. Wayne Hitt, our keyboard player, made a living at the keys in the dance halls of the 70s and 80s. The disco lights are still in his eyes while he works as a professional horticulturalist—outside—and tells the band what chord-country we are cultivating. Shawn Webster has a carpentry business and pursues his passions of playing drums for longstanding puppetry and improv groups. His kit features outsider drums and junk you may not have had in your band room: jimbae, washboard, a civil war bugle.... And Robin Behn, a poet on the creative writing faculty here at UA, goes outside her work with words to play winds, this other kind of mouth-talk, building on her classical flute training to learn penny whistle, going from writing about music to writing that goes inside the music.

Waxwing has performed for contra dances all across the Southeast, from Atlanta to River Falls SC, from Knoxville to Chattanooga to Memphis to Huntsville to Birmingham. We have performed the Fiddle Tune Poems and the Original Waltzes at the Lake Eden Arts Festival, one of the largest folk festivals in the nation in Asheville SC. For more information on the Waxwing band, please visit their homepage: Here 

Videos of contradance are also available online to give you a better sense of what the dance is. A particularly good one can be found on Youtube, here 

About Creative Campus

Under the auspices of UA's Office of Academic Affairs The Creative Campus is a collaborative system connecting students, faculty, and community to nurture innovative thinkers who turn ideas into action.  Creative Campus seeks to serve as a hub of collaboration and creative activity at The University of Alabama.  At the heart of Creative Campus is the undergraduate and graduate intern program.  For more information on Creative Campus visit www.creativecampus.ua.edu

The University of Alabama, a student-centered research university, is experiencing significant growth in both enrollment and academic quality. This growth, which is positively impacting the campus and the state's economy, is in keeping with UA's vision to be the university of Choice for the best and brightest students. UA, the state's flagship university, is an academic community united in its commitment to enhancing the quality of life for all Alabamians.

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Contact: Alexis Clark, Creative Campus Coordinator, 205-348-7884, alexis.clark@ua.edu