“Some people consider us dance gypsies,” first-year Heather Doyle said.

“Not me,” responded first-year Parks Marion. “But I consider you a dance gypsy.”

Doyle and Marion are both founding members of the new Fancy Feet and Fingers club. The club is sponsoring a Contra dance tonight at 8:00 p.m. in Dana Auditorium as part of Religious Emphasis Week’s Chow Down, Center Down, Hoe Down. The dance is preceded by lessons at 7:30 p.m.

Fancy Feet is the brain-child of several first-year students. The club officers – Annie Erbsen, president; Parks Marion, vice president; Adam Hurt, secretary; and Heather Doyle, treasurer – consider themselves friends who would hang out even if they were not working together. Recently, the four sat down with The Guilfordian to discuss the club’s origins and activities.

Marion and Hurt have been roommates since the beginning of the year. They heard about Owen Wilson, a guitar player who often plays at the club’s dances, and Hurt, who is also active in playing music, and suggested they get together to jam. Hurt estimates that between 10-20 people passed through the room to hear them play.

“All of us had heard of each other,” Erbsen said. “All of us wanted to meet each other.”

The four friends met up within a week of arriving at Guilford. A few weeks later, they put together a constitution for forming a club to bring before Community Senate.

At first they met some confusion about why they wanted to start a new club rather than work within one of the existing clubs.

“Why don’t you be a part of Expressions?” Doyle recalls hearing, referring to the other dance club on campus. Doyle explained that Fancy Feet believes it has a specific focus on social dancing and the music that accompanies it, as opposed to performance dancing.

“We think everyone should know how to swing dance and contra dance,” Parks said.

In deciding on a club name, the leaders played around with different variations of alliteration before settling on the Fancy Feet and Fingers. Parks noted that the name was inclusive of both dance and music.

Sehate approved the club, and awarded an operating budget, albeit a meager one, for the year.

“New clubs have a limit of $500,” Rebecca Saunders, advisor to Community Senate, said.

Fancy Feet has also solicited funds from other clubs, including Student Union, to fund their activities.

The club held their first dance, a contra dance, in October, for which they estimate there were 120 people in attendance.

One change the club leaders have noticed since the club started is that more Guilford students are going to Contra dances in the area. “And they go of their own accord,” Hurt said. “Not necessarily because of what we are doing.” Fancy Feet leaders are willing to help arrange rides for students who want to attend dances off-campus, but so far most students have arranged rides on their own.

So, what is Contra dancing?

“If you take Irish dancing and square dancing and throw in music and whooping and hollering, you get Contra dancing,” Marion said. He quickly added that he felt there was “so much more to it.”

Contra dancing, which traces its roots in part to the Appalachian folk tradition, involves a set collection of steps or geometric patterns performed by the dancers. Parks estimates there are about 20 basic steps that can be arranged in thousands of sequences. The leaders agreed that it was easily to pick up some of the basic steps fairly quickly, and that most people at dances do not care if you don’t know what you are doing.

“If they give you trouble for not knowing what you’re doing, they are called a ‘contra nazi’,” Doyle said.

The Greensboro contra scene, according to the leaders, is generally free of contra nazis, although Hurt indicated he had met one recently. The atmosphere at dances is typically casual and festive, a mood that is reflected in the participant’s dress.

Marion often wears a skirt when he dances. “It’s so you don’t split your pants,” he said, “but that’s a more recent development.”

Long ago, when spouses attended dances in the mountains, the men did not want their wives to dance with other men. Since this in turn meant they could not dance with other women, some men would dress in skirts so they could dance with other men.

Today, however, wearing skirts is more a matter of personal choice and convenience.

“They don’t wear skirts where I come from,” Hurt said.

“I have some manly skirts,” Marion said. “I have a skirt that has men wearing skirts on it.”

Contra dances at Guilford are unique in that they are completely student organized. Appalachian State is one other school where students occasionally organize their own dances, but according to the Fancy Feet leaders, most schools that hold dances do so with closer administration sponsorship.

Fancy Feet, which aims to hold dances on a monthly basis, also turn to students to provide the music for the dances, another innovation. Jonathan Thielen, recently appointed Environmental Sustainability Coordinator at Guilford, regularly provides music for the dances, as do Owen Wilson and Adam Hurt.

Wilson and Hurt have each been involved in the release of recent CDs. Hurt has his own CD, Intrigue, while Wilson produced a CD by the Morrison Brothers band for which he wrote some of the songs.

While they may not all have CDs, the leaders of Fancy Feet have all been involved in folk music and dancing long before they came to Guilford.

For example, Marion, who grew up in Brystal, NC, recalls how he used to travel two hours to Asheville to attend dances when he was in high school.