When I was a very young and unseasoned caller, I fell in love with contras and tried to include them in my one-nighters. In order to get a majority of people to understand the progression, I had to make the walkthrough longer than the dance. It didn’t help that I was using dances like Haymakers’ Jig, which has a ladies chain and needs a decent swing to avoid falling flat. People were giving up and sitting down before the music stopped. After a year or two I gave up on using contras with groups of all first-timers.
I had better luck with a twice-monthly series I co-produced in NYC for several years. I typically did one contra per night, sometimes two. (I’ve always tried to give people material they wouldn’t otherwise have been exposed to: contras in those days when I was in an all-squares area, squares more recently as contras have become the norm.)
At one-nighters these days I always do a Sicilian circle as the second dance of the evening, usually the first figure of Ed Durlacher’s Sanita Hill Circle: circles, do-si-dos, stars, forward & back and pass through. (If there aren’t enough people for a Sicilian, I change B.2 to a scatter promenade.) I tell the group (if I’m not doing the scatter version) that they may have heard the term “contra dances” and that this is an easy example. “In a square dance you do different things with the same people; in a contra dance you do the same thing with different people.” In a Sicilian you get the repetition and the progression, which together provide most of the feel of a longways contra without requiring a lot of teaching about the different roles and the change of roles at the end of the line.
Very often, during the initial inquiry and negotiations, the organizer will ask for contra dances as my part of the program, or will refer to the whole event as a contra dance. I’ve learned to ask what they’re thinking of when they say “contra.” Usually they mean the sort of thing I normally do: easy all-moving dances in a variety of formations. They call it “contra dancing” because that term is now more common than “square dancing” in New England outside the MWSD scene. Sometimes they have almost no idea what’s involved; when I describe my typical ONS program, they say that’s just what they want. I rarely encounter a ONS organizer who knows what duple contras are and definitely wants one or more. When that happens, it’s usually because a substantial percentage of the group will be regular contra dancers. I may call something like Chorus Jig “for those who know,” or something like Jefferson’s for everyone, making sure the first-timers are dispersed throughout the set. Or both if time allows.
My goal is always to provide a maximum amount of moving to music with a minimum of teaching.
Tony Parkes
Billerica, Mass.