Announcing Contra Connections: A Free Intermediate Contra Dance Workshop Curriculum

From Brooklyn Contra and Alyssa Adkins

Hi Friends,

Thanks so much for taking the time to take a look at our workshop curriculum. Brooklyn Contra is extremely pleased to have commissioned and co-created this workshop with Alyssa Adkins in order to make what we believe is the first publicly-available curriculum for moving contra dancers from beginners to intermediate level.

You can cut to the chase and download the curriculum here, or read on to learn a little more about why we think this type of resource and workshop is so important for growing contra dance organizations.

Also, while you’re here, subscribe to this new Substack of ours! We promise more good content on contra dance organizing and generally folkyness coming soon!

Over our 15 years as a dance we’ve learned that dance organizing goes beyond the logistics of any given night. We are simultaneously shaping the culture of our own dance, an ecosystem of contra dancing, and hopefully our culture more broadly. It's in these things that all the interesting challenges lie for us, and we hope that this workshop is a useful tool in moving your dance ecosystem forward.

At Brooklyn Contra we firmly believe that these types of workshops and formal teaching approaches are necessary at the community dance level to make contra dancing a vibrant and welcoming social dance form. We see this more formal teaching approach sitting alongside the traditional “folk” approach to learning dance, which, while in many ways lovely, presents a few key weaknesses that a more formal approach can overcome when presented alongside.

Specifically, the folk apprach:

1. Breaks down when a region lacks a concentration of long-term/experienced dancers, or when a community experiences a large loss of dancer skill and experience, as during the pandemic.

2. Does not preserve the flourishes and approaches to dance that are unique to contra, in a (generally positive) era when many contra dancers also dance blues, fusion, swing and on and on.

3. It leaves dancer advancement almost solely up to an informal process that easily falls prey to negative social dynamics (overly instructive dancers, or cliquey ones).

A taught component sitting alongside this folk model will upskill dancers more quickly, preserve contra-specific flourishes and approaches, allow contra organizers to shape their dance’s culture more directly, and ameliorate many of the challenges of the folk-teaching approach, making it more effective.

This workshop is just a first step in creating a more formalized approach to teaching to sit beside the folk approach to teaching. In coming years Brooklyn Contra hopes to create:

1. A series of 3 intermediate to advanced dancer workshops that each teach a mix of skills necessary to upskill dancers, with curriculum implemented in Brooklyn and posted online. Workshops would be ~3 hours each, with a mix instruction, practice and brief called dances.

2. A “schedule” of skills that callers could quickly teach/reinforce during dances

3. An online series of teaching “vignettes” that demonstrate key contra skills

For now, we hope you enjoy our workshop! We are making it available under a Creative Commons license, so you’re free to build on it, so long as you credit Brooklyn Contra and Alyssa Adkins as the original creators. You can always reach out to us with questions, comments etc. at info@brooklyncontra.org - and please let us know if you teach the workshop in your community, we would love to hear how it goes!

Finally, we can not recommend Alyssa’s teaching enough! If you're on the East Coast we’d recommend having her come and teach this workshop for you and call a dance after. You can find her on Instagram at Mixolyssian.

Sincerely,

Joe, Christin, and the whole Brooklyn Contra Team