Recently Friday Night Waltz hosted a new format of dance, a ContraWaltz. Contra dancing is a fun, easily learned social dance that is danced all around the US. Nearly all communities have contra dances, which are similar to the "Virginia Reel" and dances done in the movie "Gone with the Wind" . Two regular dances at Gaskells, Sir Roger de Coverly and Strip the Willow, are typical of certain kinds of contra dances. Peers also teaches and hosts contra style dances fairly regularly.
At the ContraWaltz we combined the basic contra format and added a substantial number of waltzes, polkas, hambos, and two Congress of Vienna. A typical contra has usually only 2 waltzes and one polka: ContraWaltz had 10 waltzes, 4 polkas, 4 contras, 2 hambos, and 2 Congress of Vienna dances. It was a nice mix of social dances and line dances.
Many attended the introductory contra class and danced the combination of waltzes and 4 called contra during the evening. Several asked for more information about local contra dancing. So here it is:
The local contra dance organization "Bay Area Country Dancing Society" lists local classes, dances, balls, and workshops at www.BACDS.org. Please tolerate the website as best you can: it is very difficult to use. Go to the link in the left navigation bar to select "printable calendars" and print the listing. Their online calendar is user unfriendly and often out of date or incorrect, or at best very misleading.
Other local contra dances groups are northern bay www.nbcds.org/index.html
and the Santa Cruz area: www.santacruzdance.org/
At the ContraWaltz we combined the basic contra format and added a substantial number of waltzes, polkas, hambos, and two Congress of Vienna. A typical contra has usually only 2 waltzes and one polka: ContraWaltz had 10 waltzes, 4 polkas, 4 contras, 2 hambos, and 2 Congress of Vienna dances. It was a nice mix of social dances and line dances.
Many attended the introductory contra class and danced the combination of waltzes and 4 called contra during the evening. Several asked for more information about local contra dancing. So here it is:
The local contra dance organization "Bay Area Country Dancing Society" lists local classes, dances, balls, and workshops at www.BACDS.org. Please tolerate the website as best you can: it is very difficult to use. Go to the link in the left navigation bar to select "printable calendars" and print the listing. Their online calendar is user unfriendly and often out of date or incorrect, or at best very misleading.
Other local contra dances groups are northern bay www.nbcds.org/index.html
and the Santa Cruz area: www.santacruzdance.org/
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SF Bay Area
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Re: local contra dancing and English country dancing events
Fri, June 15, 2007 - 5:52 PMThanks for steering people to the BACDS web site.
"Printable calendars" goes to PDFs of an 11x17 calendar, which may be inconvenient.
To see a simple sequential listing of forthcoming events in date order (like the FNW home page),
go a little lower down on the left-hand navigation bar and click on "All Dance Events" - which gets everything in
the database, "Contra Dance Events" to see all upcoming events that include American contra, "English Dance Events"
to see all up coming English Country Dance events, or "Barn Dance Events" to see English-ceilidh/Barn Dance
(really entry level) events.
