I was in SF this weekend for LessOnline. It's nominally a blogging conference, but in practice it's more of a Rationalist meetup. I was there in my personal capacity, though I did end up having a lot of conversations about biosecurity and may have accidentally done some fundraising. Lots of good parts, but my favorite was calling and playing for a contra dance:

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This was similar to the house party dances I've called a few times. Two sets, which was very tight (cozy!) but it was a good time!

We had a live band: Ben on piano, Aleks and me on fiddle, Catherine on sax, and a volunteer on cajon. I called while playing, which works as long as we stick to simple tunes. We had no sound reinforcement, and I did need to do some shouting when calling, but the low friction and "each musician adds something" feel of an all-acoustic dance is pretty great. It was short enough (55min), and each dance needed few enough calls, that my voice feels fine.

Almost all longways whole set dances:

• The Low-backed Car
• Bridge of Athelone
• Jacob's Potato
• Charge and Drag
• The Blob Dance (scatter mixer)
• Galopede

I didn't introduce anything that required roles, kept the piece count low, and reused figures a lot. I'd like a few more dances in this general structure: I recently added Luke's Charge and Drag, which is just the right amount of additional variation.

Unlike a house party dance we didn't take any breaks: there were enough people that we could dance straight through. I did give people a lot of time to rest and chat before teaching each dance, though, since otherwise I expect we'd have had a lot of attrition.

One thing I like about doing such simple dances is that, even with a crowd where a large majority have never danced before, there's no need to call the whole way through. People also really quickly get a sense of starting each figure when the music says to, which I think takes much longer to develop if the dance is challenging.

We put it together last minute, but it was a big success and I'm glad we did it!