Country Dance & Song Society > Resources > Audience

Category: Audience

CDSS Community Culture & Safety Toolkit

The CDSS Community Culture and Safety Task Group (CCSTG) aims to support local communities in their efforts to provide a safe environment for music, song, and dance events. We are working to provide advice and resources that will help organizers develop the policies, procedures, and supporting documents needed to understand and facilitate safety in their communities.

CDSS is not prescriptive in regard to what your community ‘should be doing.’ We recognize and value the range of living traditions practiced by our communities.

As such, we are working to develop a toolkit of resources.

Sharing the Vision: Themes and Practical Ideas for Vibrant Dance Communities

A pithy article from Max Newman on the importance of a vision, how to create one and how to share it.

From the CDSS News

Lissa Schneckenburger’s Tune A Week

Shared Weight: Positional Calling Discussion List

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.

Shared Weight: Growing Up Trad Discussion List

Growing up Trad! is an email discussion list for caregiving adults who love traditional dance, music and song. The focus of our conversation is around nurturing these traditions within our families and in particular with the children in our care.

Shared Weight: Dance Organizers Discussion List

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!

Fostering Intergenerational Community

These notes from a session at Youth Traditional Song Weekend 2015 list ways participants promote age inclusivity in their own communities.

New Old Songs: Writing Within the Tradition

Alex Sturbaum shares tips for writing new songs within folk traditions and touches on writing with less-often-mentioned themes in mind.

From the CDSS News

Addressing Racism as a Dance Community

In this short overview, the organizers of Portland Intown Contra Dance acknowledge and explain some of the various Black and African influences on American folk dance traditions.

From the Portland Intown Contra Dance

Dinah, Put Down Your Horn: Blackface Minstrel Songs Don’t Belong in Music Class

In this article, the author puts forward the need to remove racist songs from school music programs and discusses a number of songs with racist messaging.

From Dr. Katya Ermolaeva