Contra Dance Lengths

January 31st, 2023
contra
There was recently some discussion on how many minutes callers typically run a contra dance, with a lot of "well, it depends" answers. There's a place for that, but I think it's also helpful to have some numbers. I went back over the last ten evenings where I have recordings:

It looks like 8-9min is pretty common. How much variability is there within an evening?

Most callers stayed between 6.5min and 12.5min: one ran two dances shorter than that; another ran eight longer (in two evenings). If you're going to run dances much over or under 8-9min it's good to warn the band so they can plan.

These were all 3hr evenings, and the callers called 8-12 dances. Two of the evenings with 12 dances had a square: those were shorter (4:51, 4:59) and I didn't count them above. This makes 2/106 squares, well down from 14/19 in 1965. Including the squares, here's the relationship between number of dances and dance length, inversely proportional as you'd expect:

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, mastodon, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Linkpost for March

Effective Altruism

via Thing of Things March 2, 2026

The Newest Technology in Frozen

There are lots of different things in Frozen that are new-ish, but my dad and I were wondering: what is the actual newest thing in Frozen? This led me to watch Frozen a lot while taking notes. Some of the things I found included: Elastic hair-ties A safety …

via Lily Wise's Blog Posts March 1, 2026

2025-26 New Year review

This is an annual post reviewing the last year and setting intentions for next year. I look over different life areas (work, health, parenting, effectiveness, etc) and analyze my life tracking data. Highlights include a minimal group house, the usefulness…

via Victoria Krakovna January 19, 2026

more     (via openring)