Originally published in the CDSS News, Fall/Winter 2025
There are so many incredible dance, music, and song events happening all around! Perhaps you make an annual journey to a favorite music festival, camp, or dance weekend. As we all travel to various places for community connection and enjoyment, what impact are we having on the environment? Carbon emissions from travel are undeniably contributing to global warming, so what can we do to lessen our impact on the environment while still participating in our favorite activities and communities? Here are some ideas we can all take into consideration as we travel:
This 40-minute video introduces English Country Dancing. It teaches some of the basic moves found in many English Country dances; explains the structure of the dance; and entertains you with information about the history and practice of English country dancing.
Henry Morgenstein is the caller and the narrator (voiceover). Jacqui Morgenstein did the camera work, mostly using a Canon digital SLR recording in full HD.
Most of the footage was shot in a great dance studio in Traverse City, Michigan with friends who dance in our back room every week. But two of the dances we teach were in Emmanuel College, Cambridge UK and there are clips from Dartington Hall (also UK) and Pinewoods Camp in Massachusetts. Many of the dances were done to recorded CDs from the great ECD band Bare Necessities. The two in Cambridge were to live music by Notorious (Eden MacAdam-Somer and Larry Unger). None of the video was scripted, so all the incidents just happened as the result of dancers enjoying themselves.
In order to make this as unintimidating as possible to newcomers, we chose to film dancers who are simply people enjoying themselves. We feel that perfect dancing, while admittedly beautiful to watch, may well deter a newcomer from “giving it a go.” The fact that some mistakes are made and people recover with good humor should help to give the message that you don’t have to be perfect to do this.
This list is for anyone interested in exploring positional calling within traditional dance (contra, squares, ECD, community, family dance, Irish ceili, Scottish ceilidh, etc).
Our goal is to support each other by discussing topics of interest to callers specifically in relation to positional calling. We encourage callers to also join some of the other Shared Weight lists as those communities are valuable resources for other aspects of calling.
This mailing list welcomes organizers and those interested in organizing any form of traditional social dance. This includes contra, English country, traditional squares (e.g., Appalachian, New England, Quebecois, Cape Breton, etc), community/family/barn, ceili, Balfolk, and more!
This website contains an extensive list of topics for dancers of various levels. This includes everything from awareness and consideration as a dancer to how to enjoy dancing more. Useful both for teachers of dance and dancers.
Thanks to the Massachusetts Cultural Council for their generous support.