aware of it being done for contra dances at all.
For English, several of the dances have email lists for people
interested in that series and programs are posted after the fact. One
person - Mary Luckhardt - maintains cumulative spreadsheets of dances
called for all the series. I also collect that information from the
posted programs and keep my own lists. This is important in English for
a couple of reasons: There's a core set of dances that we agreed some
years back we'd like to have done at least annually at our regular
dances, so that we can maintain some kind of common repertoire in the
face of the explosion of new and newly-reconstructed dances. We like to
visit the dances that are on the Playford Ball program (different each
year) so that people don't come to them cold, so it helps to know which
ones have been done. And we don't like to repeat dances from week to
week unintentionally. In English, a repeat is really a repeat - same
figures, same tune, only one tune per dance. (And in venues like Palo
Alto English, with a house band that's mostly the same from session to
session, that tune is likely to sound very much the same each night it's
played.)
For our Jamaica Plain Gender Free English dance we've kept a book to record dances for
a long time. SInce 2010 I have been keeping a database up-to-date and exporting PDF files
to our web page - one sorted by dance name and one sorted by evening.
http:www.lcfd.org/bgfe - links near the bottom of the page