Greetings from Minneapolis/St. Paul!
We are in our fourth year of a once-a-month family dance immediately
preceding the regular Saturday evening contra. We run 6:30pm - 8:00 pm with
a break for a snack in the middle. The contra dance runs 8:00pm - 11:00pm.
We charge $10/family of any size (and any
Tapestry Folkdance Center in Minneapolis/St. Paul books contra callers and
bands in quarterly blocs (Jan-Mar, etc.). The booking committee has caller,
musician, and dancer representatives. As with many booking committees,
there are some prejudices about what constitutes quality music & calling
(som
I used to call this way (role-less) at the gender-free contra that used to
be held once a month in the Twin Cities. I was of the opinion that simply
replacing the terms "gents" and "ladies" with other terms did not make a
dance "gender-free," it just meant that we were using code words that
everyon
GF calling will work at a dance over time won’t be
> accurate.
>
> Read Weaver
> Jamaica Plain, MA
> http://lcfd.org
>
> > On Aug 10, 2019, at 1:29 AM, David Kirchner via Organizers <
> organizers@lists.sharedweight.net> wrote:
> >
> > I used to call this way (rol
At Tapestry Folkdance Center in Minneapolis, we actually came to the
conclusion some years back that we were OVERcompensating our volunteers. We
were handing out free passes right and left, sometimes for pretty minimal
effort, and one of our board members did an analysis that persuaded all of
us th
Reporting in from Minnesota: Contra, ECD, and IFD at Tapestry Folkdance
Center in Minneapolis started up at various points during the summer.
Family dance has not started dancing in person; when our committee last met
in July, we decided to wait and see until at least October, a decision that
is l
I call in a community where the majority of callers use ladies/gents
terminology, and I am pushing the envelope by using positional calling. We
also have a caller who occasionally visits from elsewhere who routinely
uses larks/robins and probably would choose not to come at all if they had
to use l
In the late 1980s, I had a college friend who went contra dancing who tried
for a couple of years to get me to go. I had no reluctance, but I normally
had other commitments on Saturday evenings, so it required extra effort and
I never tried especially hard to make it happen. The summer between juni
