Hi Liz and fellow organizers :)
Here in Ottawa, we have two situations that happen which might be similar
to what you are describing.
To set the scene:
-We have a monthly Wednesday night 'local talent' contra dance were any of
our local callers are welcome to call. (Cheaper event to attend; no talent
gets paid)
-We have contra dances two Saturdays a month which are a mix of local and
away callers (Cost to attend; much bigger dance; talent gets paid)
-We have 5-6 double events a year where there is a special afternoon dance
in addition to evening contra dance. (Poster attached for that)
Only on very rare occasion have we hired local callers for our double
dances. This is because we use those events to bring in expertise from
elsewhere AND the fact that the talent gets paid for two events rather than
one makes it possible for us to bring in talent from away, which we like to
have on occasion. The only time we've had local callers for these events
is when we did a beginner waltz lesson, beginner hambo, and also a split
event with the Ottawa ECD and contra communities. In those cases, we chose
people who had expertise in these areas.
Approximately half of our local callers call at our Saturday dances.
Mostly this is when we feel that they have enough experience and we'll
start them with a half evening. We haven't had any issues with people who
aren't ready wanting to call on a Saturday night. However, we have had the
experience of having local callers with a bit of Saturday experience not
necessarily being ready for more. What we've done to deal with these
issues is that we've made an open policy of 'we want feedback on our
organizing and we want to be able to share calling feedback with you'.
Then the main program chair will check with our committee for feedback
after the local callers call on a Saturday and share feedback from the
committee.
Not sure if this helps...
Thanks,
Emily in Ottawa
Howdy, I got an email from the creators/maintainers of this list which said
in various places it was the musicians list, organizers list, and upon
second reading, also contra callers list! Wow! I'm going by the actual
name, which is organizers. So.... organizers:
If your group has a special, regularly occurring dance (for example a
monthly dance on a weekend when most of your dances are weekly on a
weekday), do you have specific criteria for which of your regular callers
is eligible for calling a special night? If so, what is that criteria? If
you reply, it would help if you also tell me which dance community norms
you speak of. Our community (Cincinnati Contra Dance) is looking into this
question.
Thank you!
Liz Burkhart
Dear Musicians community,
This list has been going for many years now! It’s hard to believe. Chris and I are grateful to everyone here in our community who has worked hard to make this a welcoming, supportive place.
Chris and I are excited to be working with CDSS, and with the four new lists joining the Shared Weight community.
Check out this article in the CDSS News to learn about the Shared Weight renewal.
https://www.cdss.org/images/newsletter_archives/articles/CDSS_News_Winter_2…
Also - check out the brand new Shared Weight website: https://www.sharedweight.net
What does the renewal mean for the Musicians list?
* Our list has a renewed vision. Check it out here: https://www.sharedweight.net/lists/dance-organizers/
* The partnership among the various list founders and CDSS has created a stronger team to support this list into the future.
Other than that, our list remains the same supportive community that it’s always been.
We encourage you to spread the news and invite others to join the list!
Additional notes:
* IMPORTANT: When you respond to a post on the list, please remember to trim off old replies. It will make it much easier for others to use our list, especially those that receive the digest version.
* You can access the full list archives at: https://lists.sharedweight.net/hyperkitty/list/organizers@lists.sharedweigh…
* The Shared Weight team is excited to announce the official renewal launch of our mailing list servers for traditional dance, music, and song -- including this list!
* Instructions on this page to set up an account: https://www.sharedweight.net/about/technical-faqs/
* You should set up an account to manage your settings (e.g., change between receiving each emails or receiving the digest version of the list). If you are interested, go to this page to set up an account https://www.sharedweight.net/about/technical-faqs/ ). Sorry - old usernames & passwords no longer work given the move to a new server.
Thanks for your continued support of the Contra Callers list!
Let us know if you have any questions.
Seth Seeger & Chris Weiler
Shared Weight - A Community Resource for Traditional Dance, Music and Song
Our list founders are:
Alan Winston - ECD list
Amanda Witman - song organizers list
Chris Weiler & Seth Seeger - contra callers, dance organizers, and dance musicians lists
Ridge Kennedy - trad callers list
Weogo Reed - tradsound list
Hello everyone,
Thank you for your patience while I work out the bugs!
The sharedweight mailing lists are now hosted on Mailman version 3. You can see the archives here:
https://lists.sharedweight.net/hyperkitty/
The (super) old archives are also available at the old URLs and I am going to put a message at the top of them that redirects visitors to the new archives. The mail-archive.com archives will continue to work.
Let me know if you see or experience anything odd.
Seth
Hi everyone,
I need to make one (hopefully) final change to the server. The mailing lists will be down for a few hours, starting now. I’ll send an email all about the new set up once I’m finished.
Thanks for your patience,
Seth
Hi everyone,
I’m having some minor delivery issues. I’ll be able to work on this again tomorrow. (I have to take care of my parenting trick-or-treat duties this afternoon and evening!)
Thanks for your patience. Please hold off on conversations to the lists for now.
Seth
Hello organizers,
At long last, Shared Weight is getting ready to move to a new email host. I will be working to transition the four @sharedweight.net lists to the new host in the next week or so. I’m sure there will be some hiccups during the transition, so please hang in there with me. On the day of the move, I will send an email saying that the move is in progress. (Any emails you send during the transition may not get in to the archives.)
Ideally, you won’t even notice the change.
This is just a heads up to let you know it’s coming.
Seth
PS - For those that care about the details, I’ve built up a Linode VM running Debian Stretch and Mailman3. Outbound list traffic will go through AWS since they tend to have a good spam reputation.
Announcing that two brand new resources that could be really helpful to organizers of music and dance camps, festivals and events are in the first week of their development.
womenfolk spreadsheet
The first actually started in 2015 when I compiled a small set of information on instructor gender balance at camps. All wanted to see was the ratio of men to women instructors and musicians at a range of camps. I plopped them into a simple spreadsheet and exported the results (see image below.) My initial sample yielded results from good to abysmal, but only included one year for each even, so didn’t account for any anomalies Responses from people I showed it to were decidedly lukewarm, so I put it away for a couple of years. But this week another idea was put out that dovetailed nicely with my little spreadsheet, so I hauled it out of the mothballs and made it available online.
As it works now, I and a volunteer or two search out info from websites and put it in manually. However my current thinking is that it would be amazing if organizations would self-audit and either send me the results or add them directly to the spreadsheets. I just got my first self-entered stats from Crispin at CDSS (Thank you!) and would love to get more. While it’s easy to think of this as shaming to get organizations to do better, I would rather it was used to as a tool to see how organizations are doing better over time, or to tap the organizations who are doing well for more information on how they get such great results. It could also open up a larger conversation on why hiring for gender equality may not always be the ultimate goal and the other kinds of hiring considerations people are juggling.
A couple of things to know:
For now I’m not collecting information on ethnicity for this sheet.
If gender identity is unknown we list total staff members and only categorize the ones that are clearly one gender or the other as they choose to identify. Any time we aren’t sure, or a staff member has clearly indicated they don’t want to be counted, we leave them out of the category counts. That means we won’t always add up to 100%, but that also gives us important information about how gender identity could be influencing (or not influencing) hiring practices. I want to keep it simple without leaving anyone out!
We are not including unpaid staff or “service staff” (like child care providers, cooks etc.). We really want to get a sense of the way different camps and weekends think about hiring music and dance instructors and performers specifically.
The current document is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MjDRL3ZkHfJAsyk1p-QFTPiqVsFtiqZKEMx…
I left the 2015/16 info attached to it so you can see what results I came up with then.
If you want to enter your info, shoot me an email and I will add you in. ssgowan(a)gmail.com
————————————————
The second even more super-exciting resource is being spearheaded by A’yen Tran from Brooklyn.
Women/Black/Indigenous/non-white/LGBTQIA Music Instructor Nominee Directory
A form to nominate excellent banjo, fiddle, guitar, bass, mandolin, uke, vocal, music history and other musical teachers. This form aims to collect nominees who can be referred as music teachers with the goal of increasing representation for women, people of color and gender diversity in music camps and other musical learning opportunities. This form was created on Oct 8, 2019 by A'yen Tran with the intention of making it publicly available, particularly to music camp directors. Please feel free to self-nominate!
This will be an incredible resource for organizers to find underrepresented performers and teachers and will also be a great way for organizers to share the wealth around. Whether you know instructors who should be on this list, or want to hire more underrepresented teachers, I encourage you to take a look at both this one and the womenfolk spreadsheet and participate, if you can.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScMhZzZpzfbMkTVqSUHyFJ5YgOxxI6-EH8… <https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScMhZzZpzfbMkTVqSUHyFJ5YgOxxI6-EH8…>
Thanks,
Sarah Gowan
—————————————————————
I've just become the co-organizer of a dance weekend. Can anyone give
me tips on publicizing the weekend? We'll obviously bring flyers to
nearby dances and dance weekends, but what else should we do?
Thanks!
Larry
Hello all,
Changing the subject line to reflect the topic
of discussion.
Thank you, and please think and contribute if
you can. This could be a game changer.
Kind regards,
Paul
If people want to revisit the use of words,
please reflect that on a different thread.
