For callers, our voice is our instrument—and if you lose your voice before or at a gig, it’s bad news bears. Luckily, I’m a precious choir kid in my other life, so I’m here with some vocal health tips to help you out.

This post is broken into two sections: maintenance (stuff you should be doing on the reg to keep your voice in good health) and damage control (what to do when it’s the day of the gig and you realize your voice is going). The line between the two is fuzzy—most of the “maintenance” suggestions are all the more important when you’re in acute vocal trouble, and most of the “damage control” suggestions are a good idea as standard practice—so don’t worry too much about the distinction, and instead feel free to pick and choose the tips that feel most helpful! Read on →

The number one piece of feedback I give new callers is: “don’t say ‘gonna’.”¹

It doesn’t particularly trip me up as a dancer, since I’ve learned to translate past it—but I know that it makes life harder for less experienced folks on the floor, not to mention for the next caller who works with these dancers. And somehow, wildly, almost every new caller falls prey to this insidious phenomenon.

Let’s talk about it.

I just finished putting together my program for Brooklyn Contra tomorrow [read: April 21, 2024 (I take a while to finish blog posts okay?!)], and figured I’d share my thought process. Here’s the framework I was working with, the constraints I set myself, and how it all developed into a full dance program.

Before the Dance

Initial Constraints

Brooklyn Contra is my home dance, so I generally have a good idea of my target difficulty level there. Today is a special case because a lot of our experienced dancers will be off at NEFFA (and it’s the day after 4/20, so some people might show up uh, still celebrating); so I’m going to aim for a slightly easier program than I’d normally call here, and leave myself the option of dropping the difficulty level even further if need be.

As Carl Sagan once said: “if you wish to categorize and color-code your dances by difficulty, you must first invent the universe”. Or something like that.

Regardless of the accuracy of the above quote (which I cannot comment on), I can’t group my dances by difficulty, nor can I sort them into handy dandy color-coding based on said difficulty, until I have some idea of what actually makes up the “difficulty” (or lack thereof) or a dance.

I’ll discuss my actual difficulty categories in a subsequent post, but for now, I want to talk about all the things that go into the difficulty of a dance—because dance difficulty isn’t a simple and easily discernible linear scale, but rather a whacky n-dimensional coordinate space of characteristics that intersect in fascinating ways. Read on →

Whether you’re calling a regular evening dance or a block at a larger dance event, you want your dancers to leave the hall grinning. What might you look for in a last dance to end your session on a high note? Predictably, I have some thoughts! Here are my criteria for a good closer, and some of my favorite dances that fill this programming niche.

What makes a good closer?

Nothing too think-y

At the end of a session, and especially at the end of an evening dance or a longer event, people’s brains are fried and they just want to groove out. You don’t want to spend too much time teaching or to make the dancers think too hard. This is also not the time to take a programming risk or push the skill level of your dancers, lest you end on a gnarly dance where the hall struggles to keep it together. Instead, go for something tried and true, so you’re sure to end the evening on a high note. Read on →

Folks say that the toughest part of calling isn’t calling the dance itself, but teaching the dance beforehand. And while I agree, lately I’ve been noticing an unfortunate fact: it doesn’t matter how good a teacher you are if nobody’s listening to you as you teach. The first step for any caller, then, is to get the attention of the hall so that they can start the walkthrough. As anyone who’s ever been to a contra knows, however, this is easier said than done.

The first question to ask, given a chatty and inattentive hall, is: why aren’t the dancers paying attention? Have they been given too little time to socialize between dances, so they’re making up for it in line? Or, conversely, have they been given too much socializing time, and now the dancing has lost its momentum? Gauging the appropriate interval between dances is a matter of intuition and guesswork, and depends greatly on circumstances and ✨vibe ✨. When folks have drifted into hands-four and there’s a natural lull in the conversation as everyone looks to the caller, it’s time to start the next dance.

But, what if it’s a chatty hall and that lull never falls? Read on →

A friend was recently asking for dances to build up their collection, as they were getting back into calling and their dance box had a lot of weird nonsense in it. (You know, that one dance you collected and wrote down but never actually tested, and then you try to call it and a hole opens up in the space-time continuum. Who hasn’t been there?)

Below are the dances I’d recommend to them and to anyone else with the same question. I’ve roughly grouped them into some categories that I find useful when building up a collection—any categories or classes of dances that I’ve missed?

Opener/Beginner dances

The dances you call first or second in an evening to get the beginners oriented, or that you pull out when someone’s entire bachelorette party (for instance) rolls into the hall. There are many of these to choose from but I’ve limited myself to just a couple.

• Hypnosis by Melanie Axel-Lute - a good intro dance with low piece count and lots of moving together, that doesn’t involve a chain. Good to just get people moving and not worry about teaching a chain yet.
• Airpants by Lisa Greenleaf — glossary dance, no chain Read on →

Last weekend, I called my first techno contra (as part of a double dance at CDNY to celebrate the wedding of two of our lovely dancing humans 😍). It turns out, to no one’s surprise, that calling techno is a fair bit different from calling a regular evening dance. Here are my reflections on calling my first techno (including a bunch of great advice from folks on SharedWeight’s Callers’ Listserv).

Hey experienced contradancers! Have you been looking for a new way to contribute to your dance community? Here’s one that I’ve been trying. It’s really small, and has the potential to make a really big impact on the quality of our dances, especially as more and more of us get on board with it. Ready? Here it is:

Be quiet when the caller starts talking, and don’t talk through the walkthrough.

I’ve been contradancing for over eight years, and can jump into even the most complex and falling-apart of contras and still have some idea of what’s going on. But last summer at English-Scottish-Contra Week at Pinewoods, I tried Scottish Country Dance for the first time and I had an experience I haven’t had for quite a while: I was completely at sea in a set dance.