Festival Stats 2023

November 13th, 2023
contra, gigstats
Pre-pandemic I would publish a list each year of how many dance weekends, festivals, camps, and long dances contra bands and callers were doing: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019. It's not much work, since I'm already collecting this data for trycontra.com/events, and it's interesting to see how the most-booked performers changed over time.

With covid I wasn't tracking things for a few years, but I do have 2023. Note that the number of events is down 20% from 2019 (132 to 107) and the number of bookings is down a 25% (243 to 179 callers, 242 to 175 bands), so these are somewhat fewer and somewhat smaller events:

Bands

Playing with Fyre 9
The Dam Beavers 8
Stomp Rocket 7
Nova 5
Toss the Possum 5
The Gaslight Tinkers 5
Countercurrent 4
Elixir 4
Hot Coffee Breakdown 4
Kingfisher 4
The Engine Room 4
Alchemy 3
Drive Train 3
Eloise &co 3
Lighthouse 3
River Road 3
Supertrad 3
Wild Asparagus 3
The Figments 3
The Free Raisins 3
The Mean Lids 3
The Stringrays 3
Anadama 2
Audacious 2
Black River Ironworks 2
Contraforce 2
Contrasaurus 2
Gigmeisters 2
KGB 2
Live Wire 2
Ostara 2
Reelplay 2
Riptide 2
The Faux Paws 2
The Latter Day Lizards 2
The Syncopaths 2

Callers

Will Mentor 16
Gaye Fifer 13
Lisa Greenleaf 11
Terry Doyle 8
Bob Isaacs 7
Seth Tepfer 7
Darlene Underwood 6
Cis Hinkle 5
George Marshall 5
Janine Smith 5
Mary Wesley 5
Michael Karcher 5
Jacqui Grennan 4
Lindsey Dono 4
Nils Fredland 4
Ben Sachs-Hamilton 3
David Millstone 3
Diane Silver 3
Frannie Marr 3
Luke Donforth 3
Wendy Graham 3
Adina Gordon 2
Alex Deis-Lauby 2
Beth Molaro 2
Bev Bernbaum 2
Dereck Kalish 2
Emily Rush 2
River Abel 2
Sarah VanNorstrand 2
Steve Zakon-Anderson 2
Sue Hulsether 2
Sue Rosen 2
Susan Michaels 2
Warren Doyle 2
Referenced in:

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, mastodon, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Effective altruism and PR

I. The “effective altruists should be more concerned about PR” brigade has been out in full force on X recently.

via Thing of Things October 8, 2026

There's no point at which turning your brain off will work

In early 2025, I started seeing people turn off their brain as they use LLMs1. They would have an LLM take an action (summarize text, write some code, etc.), and just assume that it worked2. This generally didn't work in early 2025 and the result was …

via Posts on September 18, 2026

My Weirdy Creatures

Over the last few days, I've been working on some little creatres. But they're very weird. I call them "weirdy creatures". I've made quite a lot of them, I think maybe 5-6, not sure. Weirdy Predator This is a weirdy predator. They'…

via Anna Wise's Blog Posts September 13, 2026

more     (via openring)