Now two months into my stay in New Zealand, I finally found the Blues Dance community. The social dancing scene in Auckland is totally dominated by swing dance, and especially Lindy hop, but the internet told me that the swing dancers also host a monthly blues dance. So I walked out from my flat on Sunday evening to the Second Sunday Blues dance at the Surrey Pub, and found...a really quiet restaurant inside of a hotel.
I approached the only party that was sitting down, and it turned out that they were the dancers. After hanging around socializing for a bit, they got up and gave a quick lesson in basics and tried to teach us one sequence of moves. That was really weird, because blues dance is entirely about the connection with your partner and personal expression, not memorizing particular moves.
THEN, after the lesson and at the start of the social dance, our teacher put on a playlist, and everyone sat down to eat dinner. For a good 45 minutes, not a single person got up to dance, even as new people started arriving. One couple did end up dancing, and then they sat back down. After about an hour, I just started asking the people who were sitting down to dance with me, and things started picking up after that. But even then, at the end of each song, people generally went back to their tables instead of hanging around to dance with other partners.
This experience was totally foreign to me, but there were some good consequences. For one, when I wasn't dancing I was actually meeting and talking to people. In Portland, it's rare that I have good conversations at dances, and it's even more unusual that I meet other men (even though people are encouraged to dance with all genders and switch between lead and follow roles, I find many Portland blues dancers follow traditional gender roles in practice). At the Auckland dance, though, I got a chance to meet everyone, even a guy who doesn't dance at all (he just showed up because he's married to the dance teacher).
The other good outcome, which follows from actually talking to people, was that I found out about another set of weekly blues dances. On Tuesday, I went to the All-In Swing gender neutral blues dance which is held at Hum Salon - a really adorable Victorian house that's become a cafe/co-op that would fit right into the landscape of Portland or Santa Cruz. While the organizers cleared out a parlor for us, we hung out on the porch drinking beer that someone bought, enjoying the summer evening and chatting. After about 15 minutes, we started a lesson from a visiting dancer (Kiwi citizen, working in Portugal now) on posture and lag. After that, we had a social dance that felt much more familiar to me, with most people actually dancing the entire time.
Before I move on, I have to say that I was inspired by my experience at the All-In Swing dance. The community of blues dancers is small, but very supportive and friendly. There was no entrenched clique of elite dancers/community founders. The dancing was excellent, and I notice immediate improvements after the lesson at the beginning. And on top of all that, having an explicitly gender-neutral dance was perfectly progressive, and helped me feel totally comfortable asking anyone and everyone to dance. And I did literally dance with every single person.
In Portland, I always thought it was important for me to dance with people besides women, but as liberal as people are there I felt nervous about approaching most men. Maybe out of latent heteronormativity that I haven't been able to shake; maybe because I assume a lot of guys would turn me down. I don't know. But at this dance, this forward-thinking dance, we were all expected to lead, to follow, and to dance with everyone. And I fucking love that. Note to dance organizers (past/present/future): Do more of this!
On Wednesday we had an Auckland Archaeology Drinks event at the Old Government House on campus at Uni. It's supposed to be a monthly event, but it was the first time the archaeology community got together since I arrived. Most people from Uni had already gone away for the holidays, or were busy or something, but tons of people from private archaeology companies and the local heritage councils (basically the city government) showed up to catch up with each other. I got to hang out with some of my friends from Uni and they introduced me to a bunch of new people who've done important work all over the country. I'll probably end up talking to a few of them to try and uncover some details about archaeology in New Zealand for my research here.
My weekend started off with a trip to the beach with the Post-Graduate Student Association. We rode on a bus out to Muriwai on the west coast of North Island, and I got to sit with a couple friends I'd met at the last PGSA picnic, Albert and Kasi.
Things got a little uncomfortable when we arrived at the beach and a leader from the PGSA took over and told us that we were about to go on a walk and we HAD to stay with the group or we'd get lost and would get no lunch. I absolutely hate walking with big groups of people, especially when they are dictating how fast I'm allowed to walk and what I can stop to look at and for how long. So I just decided to fall behind the group and go at my own pace. Weirdly the few people I already know were trying to make sure I stayed with them, but I was so much happier doing my own thing.
After lunch I was thinking about going for a swim if the water was warm enough (it was), but then people started organizing a sandcastle building competition and I let myself get pulled into a group with the people I'd been eating lunch with. The five of us took our standard issue blue plastic shovel and a bucket of sand castle building tools and headed to the beach, talking about design ideas as we went. We started throwing a bunch of sand up in a pile to create a Christmas-y star for the base of our castle, and almost immediately a big wave came up and ruined everyone's work. So we shifted further away from the water and started piling sand again, and then started shaping the points of the star when someone realized we should make an octopus instead. We spent the next 30 minutes shaping the eight arms into an interwoven network of defenses with the octopus head at the center of the castle. When the PGSA judges came around the gave us first place for creativity. Our team walked up the beach for a while afterwards, and climbed the steep dunes for a view of the landscape, and then it was time to head back to Auckland.
When I got back into town, I went south with my flatmates to a party in Hillsborough where we previously attended a Halloween party. This was a similar Christmas party, with beer pong and dancing again. This time around there was also some shitty karaoke (meaning the backup music was all fake synth covers, and the microphone had a weird echo effect built in), and pavlova, a traditional Kiwi dessert. It's basically a bunch of meringue between two very light pieces of crisp with whipcream and fruit piled on top. The flavor was alright, but the textures were really interesting. I think I would just keep eating the crisp.
This week I went out to parkour twice. On Tuesday nobody else showed up and I just went around exploring for a while. Thursday I ended up taking John out to teach him some parkour, and a guy named Leo who I'd met previously also found us. We went out to the Art Gallery, which has a pretty decent area for training just to the side of it, and I showed John how to do precisions and quadrupedal movements. I was reminded of how much I enjoy coaching people in parkour, and how much better my technique is when I have to teach someone. We also ended up going to the empty top-levels of a parking garage where we climbed walls and railings on the rooftop, with great views of the city.
Then, on Friday morning, I finally went to see Rogue One. I planned ahead to see it with my Mom, who was still in California. She sat down to the movie at 12:30 on Thursday in Marin County, and I sat down at 9:30 on Friday in Auckland, so we were both watching it at the exact same time. When we got out, we texted all about what we thought of the movie, and both nerded out about the costumes, makeup, and characters. It was a good, rare opportunity to make new experiences with people back home, and a great end to my week.
In Academic News: After I got back from Wellington I didn't have much direction from my advisors, so I tried getting back into writing a journal article based on my master's thesis. It was extremely difficult getting back into writing. The first day I got a paragraph and a half down. The second day I got about a page. By the end of the week I'd finally finished up a draft of my Background and Materials sections, so now all I have to do is summarize the Results, Discuss, and Conclude.
Then I had a meeting with Melinda and Thegn on Monday and we talked a lot about ethics and morality. The question basically came down to, "Are archaeologists responsible for getting permission from descendant communities everytime we study archaeological collections? Or is that permission implicitly given when we permission for excavation is given?" I might end up exploring that later in a special post.
Well, after the meeting, I spent the rest of this week learning how to use Microsoft Access and building a database for the archaeological assemblages I want to include in my research. I scoured the internet for archaeological reports, and gathered all of the publicly available documents that I could. When I get back to school after the break, I'll have to go to the library to scan old newsletters, journals, and books, and request archived reports from the Heritage Council. Fun!
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