Contra dance alone or with other dancers in your household, along with dancers across the continent! We'll be dancing to recorded music (due to tech limitations) and live calling. Dancing with imaginary people ("ghosts") is challenging, so we are assuming everyone is a reasonably experienced contra dancer. There will be no beginners’ lesson. But the good news is that when you dance alone in your living room, the contra line is exactly where you imagine it, and unexpected moves become glorious new choreography! Everyone is welcome to join!
Join the Zoom meeting any time between 7:00 and 7:30PM Eastern on Saturday, but try to join by 7:20 if possible. There will be an introduction to the dance at 7:25 and dancing will begin promptly at 7:30 Eastern.
We hope to have these dances every 2nd and 4th Saturday evening until we can dance in person again. You can keep track of scheduled dances here or on the Toronto Contra Dance Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/TorontoContraDance . At our first dance we hit our 100 participant limit, but this time we can have up to 500 participants, so tell your contra dancing friends, and feel free to repost this announcement to your local contra dance websites!
Participation is free, but if you enjoy the dance, we ask that you make a donation (in an amount you are comfortable with) to benefit freelance artists in our music & dance community who are struggling with the loss of income due to COVID-19 shutting down all our in-person events.
where you can donate to a freelance musician or caller. You are welcome to choose an artist of your choice, but the list loads in random order, so you can also simply donate to whoever is top on the list when you load the page, knowing that others will be donating to someone else, and everybody ends up getting a little help in a difficult time. Or, if you like the specific music we play at the dance, we encourage you to donate to (or buy music from) the musicians whose music we use. We will post a list of those artists to the Toronto Contra Dance Facebook page after each dance. Please come to the dance, and afterwards decide what it was worth to you, and give generously to keep the music going until we can all meet in joy on the other side of this pandemic.
The dance is organized by Becky Liddle, ably assisted by Drew Delaware, with a great deal of help from other Toronto area folks. Becky happens to be president of Toronto Contra Dance, but this dance is only loosely associated with TCD. So if you have any complaints, please blame Becky or Drew, not TCD! :-)