Atlanta also gets a lot of first-time dancers that do not return. I wish I had my fingers on the numbers, because I know people used to collect them, especially pre-covid. I'd guess around 10% to 25% of dancers are first-timers, just as a wild guess. Most of them don't come back a second time.

The mentally demanding aspect is real for new dancers. When I've brought people and asked them how it went, they describe a real firehose of commands and information coming in, and people grabbing at you from every direction. If you look at their faces in the line, they're often really tense and jumpy as they try to hyper-react to a situation that for them is going at break-neck speed. I remember feeling like this at a few first dances. It gets hard to remember this experience over time, because to an experienced dancer a lot of things just click and do not need to be processed any more. It's hard to remember that that's not true for new people. You look at their faces and they look like normal people, i.e. contra dancers. But inside, they're divergent from you, and some of your words are gobbledygook to them.

In general, dance events have a lot of competition in most locales. Non-gendered is usually the expectation nowadays, in my modest travels, so it will cut out a lot of potential visitors to have an overly gendered event. Bear in mind it's not just terminology that makes an event awkward for gender diversity. Contra dance has an extra challenge for gender diversity due to the format of the dance. Unlike at a couples dance, a contra dance has you encountering each person in the line. So if you role swap for a dance, you have to not just find a compatible partner, but you're going to surprise everyone in your line. It can be emotionally draining to do that. I wonder if there are contra dance sequences that make a role-swapped dancer stand out less, e.g. no swings with neighbors, and equal encounters with larks and robins in the other couple. "Coming up next, everyone, it's a twister!" I wonder if those sequences are still fun for people who WANT a cis-het binary dance, and that's what they came for.

For organizers....  no, I am not sure either how much to push it. Getting back to the subject of repeat visitors, perhaps the biggest difference of all is a caller who brings the fun and the inclusiveness, the type who can laugh with you when something goes goofy. Micro-managing a caller's terminology will not go well.

Good luck on the quest. However it goes, I'm tremendously grateful to everyone organizing contra dances, and to all the people trying to make their dance a little bit better each week.

Lex Spoon