Despite the two activities having little overlap, a significant number of singers of Sacred Harp music are also rabid dancers on the Contra Dance scene. The experiences are fundamentally different (most Contra dancers do not play in the instrumental band and Sacred Harp singers sit and sing a capella), and the genres have no common repertoire. This paper considers theoretical avenues to describe a common phenomenological experience practitioners of these performance arts experience in the moment of performance, explored through interlocutor’s testimony gathered from fieldwork sites across New England. Dance scholars, like Tomie Hahn and Cynthia Jean Cohn Bull, have investigated the affective properties of dance, a part of the anthropoidal “sensory turn.” Music educators have explored the experiential knowledge transmitted in pedagogical situations, though mostly focusing on instrumentalists and invoking strands of ANT and Mediation theories to study the organology of these encounters. Some ludo-musicological articles, such as those by Kiri Miller, have considered the phenomonology of solo musical acts. This paper will apply these frameworks to communal musical and danced activities in order to describe a common affective complex inherent in their mode of participation. This literature suggests that the rules of performance have an inherent ‘meaning’ or ‘truth’ experienced by participants. Instead of seeking an abstracted truth content, my ethnographic research explores how contemporary participants make meaning for themselves in dialogue with narratives established by revival activists. When revived, these narrative echoed New Left social values which modern participants update to contemporary sexual and gender politics.