We have this situation at our dances in Hfx (approx 50% new each time, and level of learning for returners is slow in between,  because we have a pool of a few hundred dancers who all come occasionally but few of them come to every single one of our 8 dances per year, and there aren't any other local contra dances happening at the moment so we are their only learning opportunity). Here is how I work the learning progression each night, to ensure the beginners (and others who are still learning) do not get too confused. I try to introduce ONLY one new concept per dance. ---- Intro session for beginners - Introduce the bird roles and the relative position of each when standing facing into the circle (Larks on left, Robins on right). Then, introduce what I call "home place" - have the Ravens step into the circle to face the larks, and do a simple figure for 8 counts and come back to home. Teach allemande left and right (which I call left and right hand turns) and teach them how to feel and play with centripetal force. Teach right hand balance and pull by without looking back - and talk about the "push me pull you/elastic connection" feeling. ----- First dance - spiral dance (we get the music started and all stand in a circle. We count the beats of 8, and we clap to the beat. Then I get them moving with calls like circle left and right, into the centre and back - without any walk through.  Then I wind up and unwind the spiral.) - gets them used to moving to the music and listening to my calls. ---- Second dance - simple circle mixer - gets them used to a walk-through and dancing a dance with a 64-beat repeating structure. And I get them to practice at least one figure they will use in the next dance (in this case right hand balance and pull by) E.g. big circle circle left circle right into the centre, stomp feet into the centre, say "hey!" For next 32 beats, everyone scatter and find at least one person to balance right and pull by with (as ppl get more comfortable I challenge them to do this with 2 or even 3 people).... and then reform the circle on time for the dance to start again. I dance this about 8-10- times through-- not long as it's not very interesting - but it's fun for a bit! ---- Third dance A very easy contra dance in a sicilian circle so they can get the sense of a duple minor improper dance formation, without having to deal with being out at the ends. And this is a key thing in my mind:  for a duple minor improper dance to be classified as SIMPLE, each figure lasts only 8 counts and each figure ends with them coming back to their original "home place". We talk about "home place" a lot during the first few dances. Also key: the progression should always happen from home place and be a straight walk - i.e. no do si do or allemande 1.5 which gets pelple turning in circles and leads to confusion.  My top choice is right hand balance and pull by your neighbour.   Balance ring and pass N by right shoulder is also good.  Or arches where one couple ducks under the other. Finally -- before I do the walk through, we first identify neighbour and partner and practice facing each of them.  I might say "point to you partner! Now point to your neighbour!  Now high five your partner! Now high-ten your neighbour!".  We then practice the figure we learned in the preceeding dance - right balance and pull by neighbour - to see how the sicilian circle progresses.  We progress the circle several times to ensure people are crystal clear on the progression/their direction of travel, prior to learning any other parts of the dance. Then we do the walk-through. "Very simple contra dance" (can be done in lines or sicilian)  I wrote this myself but acknolwedge it has probably been invented before :) Circle left Circle right Right hand star Left hand star Look to your partner, right hand turn (a right hand turn is what I call a right hand allemande) Look to your neighbour, left hand turn* Form a ring and balance it twice Right hand balance with your neighbour and pull by to the new group. *after walking the right and left hand turns, I pause in the walk-through and talk about the importance of linking figures to feel a never-ending flow-  we now practice doing the partner right hand turn and the neighbour left hand turn one after another without ever stopping moving. This dance is a total winner for me.  It is fun, super straightforward, and almost never results in any confusion, an excellent "Training" dance in my view!! ----- before the fourth dance: Progressing contra lines before I do a fourth dance, I get people to watch a demo of 3 duples in a contra line in the centre of our "Teaching circle" - they do random interactons with each other and then progress using a right hand pull-by.  We progress it a few times and carefully watch and talk about what happens when you are ejected at the end. Then I get everyone to form a series of shorter-than-normal duple improper contra lines. (i.e. max 3-4 duples in each line ideally) We then do a series of random interactions in the duples (e.g. face across to your partner.  HIgh five your partner!  Now face up and down to your neighbour.  Do a right hand turn with your neighbour and come back to home!  Now take right hands with your neighbour and pull by to the new group!") I run these little activities over and over, eventually paring it down to just the "pull by the right with your neighbour!"- until everyone has been out at the top and the bottom and back into the dance at least once.  I find this really helps avoid later confusion. ---- fourth dance - Duple minor improper dance without ever leaving home place (or without leaving it for long).  Same or similar progression to the Sicilian dance. So now the key for me is to get people totally comfortable in what I Think of as a "standard" (duple minor improper) contra dance, without taking them out of the home position they are becoming accustomed to. This means using figures like right and left allemands/shoulders round, one and two hand balances, and do-si-dos for partner/neighbour interaction... and figures like circle/star right and left, balance the ring, LLFB for interaction with your full duple -- but avoiding swings for now. Recently I've even taught a Larks (right handed) chain for the fifth dance of the evening, before teaching a swing, and it went over very well! Here's an example of a fourth dance I used recently, inspired by Louise Siddon's recent post about her balance the star move.  The dancers really loved it and we all took a moment to give some applause to Louise for the inspiration! Right hand star (hands across) Balance the star, spin right Left hand star Balance the star, spin left (note you should be in your original home place!) Partner right hand turn (aka allemande) Neighbour left shoulder round Long lines forward and back Neighbour: 2 hand balance once, then pass by the right shoulder (with a little tug off your neighbour's hands!) to the new group. ---- fifth dance - take them temporarily out of home position - and get them to notice it - , but get them back to home before the progression (again, I'll note that I write most of my early-evening dances to craft exactly what I want, but it doesn't mean that this dance doesn't already exist, so I humbly offer credit to whoever else in the universe may have written this!  I definitely give credit to Sherry NEvin's family contra for this one :) ) Balance the ring x 1 then snap open the line to face down the hall (the line breaks between the #2 larks and robins) Down the hall, turn alone Come on back, bend the line (notice you are out of home place!) Balance the ring x 1 and pass neighbour by the right shoulder (to switch places with your neighbour and face in to the circle again- back to home place!) Partner right hand turn Neighbour do si do As couples, do si do (you have about 12 counts to do this, don't rush it) Pull your neighbour by the right hand, to progress to the new group --- Sixth dance - Do either a swing or a proto-swing move.  Possibly include a raven's chain. More recently before doing a dance with a swing, I've now been doing a dance with the following instead: Open the dance with an 8-beat figure:  neighbour 2 hand balance and wheel around to switch places, with the robins in the centre and the larks on the outside as they switch.  End facing across to partners do do either a partner interaction, or LLFB, or ravens chain. This has the same effect as a short swing, but without turning round and round which has more potential to lead to confusion. Rather, if you just tell the neighbours to switch places, everyone is bound to end up in the correct position. This helps set the stage for a seventh dance which could open with with a 2 hand balance and swing with neighbour - everyone will already have a muscle memory of where to end the swing. Here's an example of a sixth dance I did recently that worked well. This one actually doesn't have the "proto swing" that I describe above, but it still went well. As always, apologies/credit to anyone else who has written this dance before me :) Circle left Circle right Balance the ring and petronella turn one place (no clap!) to join your partner on the side Swing your partner Long lines forward and back Neighbour let shoulder 'round (Emphasize the flow between this and next move) Circle right 3 places to go back to your home place - hold an inside hand with your partner to face the other couple As couples, veer right and stomp twice, then veer left to the new couple! ------- I'll stop with the dance examples there, but for my seventh dance I would include both a neighbour and a partner swing, but no other new figures, so they can just practice everything they've learned so far.  You'll notice that every dance so far has also involved the couples coming back to home place, before progressing. Perhaps in the 7th dance, I would try them out on a progression where the 1s and 2s have already switched places. A really good way to do this is something that involves turning 180 from your old neighbour to face the new neighbour (as opposed to exploding a star to new neighbours, which is more disorienting). For example, at our last event, I had a 7th dance where the 1's were already below the 2's at the end, and for the last figure, you do a single two hand balance with your neighbour, then change to "patty cake hands" (I said this playfully) and push off your neighbour's hands, to turn 180 degrees to new neighbour.  Not the most twirly-fun move, but straightforward and hard to mess up. It matches the philosophy I've been honing with my group, which is, if you start with more straighforward moves, it might sacrifice some level of potential "Fun" at the start, but it means you can build skills quickly and confidently without major setbacks (like six walkthroughs! been there!!), and therefore move towards more "fun" in an efficient manner while minimizing frustration along the way. In my dances, the first 5 or 6 may not be rip-roaring dances, but they always go smoothly and nobody can complain. I used to try for harder ones earlier on - which in theory pleases the more advanced dancers, but in practice pleased nobody cause we just couldn't get them off the ground without a ton of setbacks, with our large number of beginners!! (oh, and for an eighth dance I'd introduce something else new (e.g. wavy lines, ravens chain if not already done, or maybe a hey though I haven't felt ready to ask my group to do a hey yet!!  maybe next month :)  ) Hope this is helpful :) Kat K in Halifax

Amplifying Jimmy Akin's suggestions: One online source for easy dances, once you get away from typical contras, is "A Barn Dance Repertoire". https://barndances.org.uk/difficulty.php (The things ranked as difficulty 1 are in general pretty easy, though some of them are really not contra-like.) What you have to balance here is how much you're committed to contra formation and how much you're committed to early dancer success. If you have room in the hall, Sicilian Circle formation removes the confusion of turning around at the ends - you just keep going around the ring. Barn dances usually have swings that end where they started, rather than relying on them to be progressive, so you don't have the fragility of swings ending up in the wrong place (and sometimes you're not opposite your partner any longer, etc). Some of them don't even have swings. Modern contra is pretty challenging to bootstrap. It works fairly well for integrating newcomers into an existing crowd if the experienced dancers make a point of dancing with new dancers and if the callers don't throw in a lot of "lose your partner - find your partner" dances. If your experienced dancers will tolerate it you can build up through whole-set (what Joe's calling "single minor") to get them used to listening to the music and dancing to the phrase, Sicilian circles ("Haste to the Wedding" is great, and you can have a short short partner swing that ends where it started; "Solidier's Joy" has a chain that's a struggle with 100% new dancers but should go smoothly with 50% new), and then graduate to duple minor longways once the new dancers have built up some competence. (That's a different use of barn dances than having a party for non dancers where you can't expect anybody learned anything from the last dance and where you can pretty much do anything you can put across becasue the dancers have no expectation - squares, 3-couple sets, etc. To do it this way you have to have pedagogical reasons for your choices and fewer things that are just fun but don't lead anywhere.) You're likelier to retain your experienced dancers thorugh unchallenging Sicilians, etc, if you can get things moving efficiently and have a high proportion of dancing. Hee's an easy dance I wrote that makes a pretty good second dance with a lot of beginners. It does have two swings and you do have to end up on the right side in the swing but there's a while to sort that out. It's a pretty good one for group consciousness to emerge: CLAIRE'S REQUEST Alan Winston 11/17/2017 Form:IC Fig:NB&S;OvalL&R;BTR,PS;Prom,WC: A1: Neighbor balance and swing A2: (Take hands, all around the set to make a big oval.). Turn the oval left and right. B1: 1-2: (With hands, balance ring in original foursome (keep the hand you've got with neighbor and take the free hand with your partner) 3-8: Ravens/ladies draw Partners to their side for a swing. B2: 1-4: Partners promenade to gents/larks side 5-8: Ladies/Ravens chain to current neighbor, look for new neighbor -- Alan