Dance Weekend and Festival Survey

February 18th, 2014
contra, gigstats, music
As the Free Raisins start getting booked for dance weekends and festivals I'm trying to figure out how they work. How many are there? Where are they? What bands play? Starting from a list Alex made, supplementing with ContraDanceLinks, and removing any that didn't look like they hired contra dance bands I made a list of all the weekends, festivals, camps, and long dances I could find: sheet. The bands included are the ones listed on the event's website, which in some cases are for 2013 and in others are for 2014, mostly depending on whether the site has been updated yet.

(If people know of other events I missed; let me know and I'll update the list!)

It looks like there are about 115 [1] of these events a year, averaging two every weekend, though somewhat clumped especially on long weekends. For 2013-2014 there were 226 band slots, averaging two per event but again not evenly distributed:

number of bands booked events
1 34
2 60
3 15
4 4
5 1
6 1
Sorting by name and taking all the bands that were listed at least twice I get:
times booked band
16 Great Bear Trio
12 Perpetual e-Motion
9 The Mean Lids
8 Nor'easter
8 Elixir
6 Latter Day Lizards
5 Hotpoint String Band
5 Maivish
5 The Free Raisins
5 Wild Asparagus
4 Crowfoot
4 Gallimaufry
4 Lift Ticket
4 Tidal Wave
3 Giant Robot Dance
3 Notorious
3 Sassafras Stomp
3 Syncopaths
3 The Moving Violations
3 The Stringrays
3 Uncle Farmer
2 Anadama
2 Clayfoot Strutters
2 Contraforce
2 Euphor
2 Ladies at Play
2 On the Fly
2 Relative Harmony
2 Swallowtail
2 The Coffee Zombies
2 The Contrarians
2 The Gaslight Tinkers
2 Velocipede
2 Wild Hair

Update 2014-08-02: The data above is a mixture of 2013 and 2014, just whatever was on the dance weekend website when I looked at it back in February. I did another pass yesterday when I was making my dance weekend heatmap which means I now have the full set of 2014 bands (I think) and a more self-consistent dataset. Updated table:

13 Great Bear Trio
13 Perpetual e-Motion
9 Elixir
9 Nor'easter
8 Latter Day Lizards
8 The Mean Lids
7 The Free Raisins
6 Hotpoint Stringband
6 Maivish
6 Stringrays
4 Crowfoot
4 Notorious
4 Wild Asparagus
3 Contraforce
3 Gallimaufry
3 Groovemongers
3 Sassafras Stomp
3 Syncopaths
3 The Canote Brothers
3 The Moving Violations
3 Tidal Wave
3 Uncle Farmer
2 Contra Sutra
2 Contraversial
2 Euphor
2 Hold the Mustard
2 KGB
2 Ladies at Play
2 Out of the Wood
2 Relative Harmony
2 Swallowtail
2 The Avant Gardeners
2 The Clayfoot Strutters
2 The Coffee Zombies
2 The Contrarians
2 The Ripples
2 Toppish


[1] This is an undercount: I verified each of these 115 so they all exist, but I probably missed some.

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