I host a contra weekend and I’ve taught workshops. I’ve been to…a few dance weekends as a dancer as well, and I’ve seen a wide variety in what callers and organizers put together; this has informed what we do in our weekend.

We always try to have a theme. We usually don’t come up with it; we’d much rather have the caller present something s/he’s prepared for than something that occurred to the organizing committee, but we want the dancers to know what to expect. If the workshop is one long medley grid square it’s nice to know you’ll need the stamina for an hour’s worth of continuous dancing before you start.

Themes fall into two broad categories:  Dancer training (safety, gender-role-swapping exercises, how to cope with end effects, etc.) or parts of the dance world to explore (chestnuts, diagonal moves, emerging dance trends, try squares or ECD or African dance or polka, or just “here are some of my favorite dances”).

This doesn’t always work. Sometimes the caller doesn’t have anything ready; in that case we relabel the session as just dancing.

The word “workshop” implies you’re going to learn something, so we apply that to our caller workshops too. I sat thru too many sit-in-a-circle-what-do-you-want-to-talk-about sessions where I didn’t come out knowing any more than I went in, so when it was my turn to organize them I insisted that the caller have a plan. Something to teach. Some way to improve the experience of the people who come to our dances—even if it’s just coaching the callers thru a dance.

Ditto with musical workshops. Most are “let’s learn a couple of tunes”, and feedback from our musicians was that this was a waste of time—they can learn a fiddle tune from a YouTube video or a cd. Our music workshops always have some element of teaching to them: improvisation, or how to structure a dance set, ways to build energy, or something aspiring (mostly dance) musicians can use. We provide time and space for jamming as well, but want the workshops to have structure to them.

--Marty