In this dance, 1s are larks and 2s are robins. That means:
- When someone from first couple swings, they take the left-hand (traditional men's) role, finishing on the left.
- When someone from second couple swings, they take the right-hand (traditional women's) role, finishing on the right.
I've classified this as “longways duple minor” rather than “longways duple minor improper” but proper/improper isn't really meaningful here – it's not a “proper” dance either!
| A1 | Balance and swing your neighbour (8) |
| A2 | Circle left ¾ (3) Swing your other neighbour (5) |
| B1 | Long lines forward and back (4) Second couple right shoulder round 1½ to change places and face the right-hand wall (traditional woman's side in a proper set) (4) |
| B2 | Dolphin hey, second couple acting as the unit, passing right shoulder with the first couple person they are facing to start, finishing in progressed places (8) |
For the right shoulder round part, I teach this dance by choosing a landmark in the room to name the side by (such as “the window wall“), which is a common technique in calling non-contra dances gender-free (I've never come across a situation where the room was sufficiently symmetrical that a designation wasn't obvious).
I can't remember when I wrote this exactly but I think it shortly after Magpies, when Sheffield Scratch Contra, a gender-free contra club, had just started. Like most gender-free settings I'm aware of (certainly in the UK, and including IVFDF, which had just gone gender-free), it uses larks instead of men and robins (or previously ravens) instead of women. No-one is required to dance both roles but most find it more fun to do so, frequently in the same dance!
It got me thinking – if you remove the constraint that men only every swing one way and women only ever swing the other way, what new choreographic opportunities does that open up? What new dances can we do in such settings that couldn't have existed before? This dance gives dancers to swing everyone else in the set except their partner!
The dance itself has a dolphin hey in it, which is not novel for contras but not common either and needs teaching; otherwise the dance isn't too complex. Obviously if you're teaching this then everyone needs to be comfortable in dancing both roles of the swing, and comfortable doing a swing with anyone regardless of gender. That's true of many places I call, but not all of them.
Choreographically, the setup shares some similarity with cross contras in that the start formation does not have larks to the left of a robin and vice versa. Since all swings necessarily do end like this, there needs to be a symmetry breaking figure to get you back into that start formation (or preferably a figure with different sort of symmetry). In this case first swing results in one side changing places and the other side not, creating normal lark/robin symmetry, and the dolphin hey is a useful figure to break the symmetry again and get you back opposite your partner when you progress.
14th March 2025: A dolphin hey is a hey for three where one couple as acting as a unit. When the couple working as a unit (second couple in this case) reach the end, they turn around individually so that the person in front changes. Thanks to Louise Siddons for both using this dance in one of her workshops and pointing out that if dancers are not familiar with the dolphin hey then they can of course just keep the same person in front all the way. I'd add that there's also plenty of opportunity for more experienced second couples to swap sides if they feel like it as part of this move – it makes very little difference to the dance that follows!
Louise related to me a discussion she had in another instance of that workshop where the participants really enjoyed the dance but were unsure whether audiences would accept a contra dance without a partner swing, which we both found fascinating. Normally a dance without a partner swing has no swings at all but that's really not what's happening here. Nonetheless, if you're worried about this, you can give people explicit permission to dance with the same partner again later if you feel they might need your permission to do so. And of course they have as many partner swings as they like at the end of the set!