Michael Dyck's Contradance Index

... celebrating 11 years of indexing ...

(Wondering what contradance is? Try this set of links.)


Last updated 2008 May 3: 8327 records, 5886 distinct titles.

Title
Author

Recent updates:
Feb 1 wCrane 1 dance added ("Cranberry Muffins")
Feb 1 wFischle 6 dances added ("Star Thru Mixer", "Gloria's Star Thru Mixer", "Ladies In Mixer", "Circle Mixer", "Sunny Side Mixer", "My Pretty Girl Mixer")
Feb 1 wMorgenstein Mystery dance identified as "Still More O'More"
Feb 1 wWatson 1 dance added ("Less is More")
Mar 1 wNance 5 dances added ("Creamed Possum", "Armadillo on the Half Shell", "Road Runner Soup", "Noisy Oyster", "Possum on the Turnpike")
Mar 1 wRavitz 4 dances added ("Between the Lines", "Passion Breakdown", "unnamed 4", "unnamed 3")
Mar 1 wTepfer 6 dances added ("Blackberry Cobbler Quadrille", "Apple Pie Quadrille", "A different way forward", "Gypsy Everyone", "SnowBall Shimmy", "untitled star weave dance")
Mar 1 wWatson 1 dance added ("New Circle Mixer")
May 3 wCalwell 4 dances added ("Yum-yums in the Kitchen", "Tuk-Tuk Ride", "32 Seconds", "Power Play"); 2 dances withdrawn ("Furnace Creek", "Texas Promenade Too")
May 3 wCrane 4 dances added ("Dinner at 6:30", "Leap Dance", "Raw Bar", "Sadie's Day")
May 3 wGoss 1 dance added ("Little Buddy")
May 3 wMohr 3 dances added ("The Joy of Six", "Love Sting", "Sunset Limited")
May 3 wRPDLW_1997 Change URL.
May 3 wRavitz 3 dances added ("Jump the Tracks", "Susan's Swing", "Waterfall"); 1 dance renamed ("unnamed 4" to "Tara's Trip")
May 3 wWhitehead 3 dances added ("Selston Wave", "That Old Dixie Daisy", "Zip It Up!")
May 3 wFontana Index Karen Fontana's website (1 dance).
May 3 wGrisanti Index Jerome Grisanti's website (4 dances).
May 3 wKaufman Index Jeff Kaufman's website (38 dances).
May 3 wKirchnerB Index Barb Kirchner's website (8 dances).
May 3 wKrackau Index Hans Krackau's website (48 dances).
May 3 wPage Index Chris Page's website (44 dances). (And thanks to Chris for the pointers to Fontana, Grisanti, Kirchner, and Krackau!)


My goal for this web site is to index every contra dance ever published. Moreover, I intend to include any other country dances that are published alongside contras. By "published", I mean in a book, booklet, newsletter, or on the World-Wide Web.

I'm not trying to index every publication, just the ones that have appeared since 1953. (If you know of any I'm missing, please let me know!) I chose that cutoff because "The Contra Dance Book" by Rickey Holden "is a compilation of all the contra and progressive circle dances which have appeared in readily available American literature between 1850 and 1953." So by indexing that book (CDBH), I'm claiming to cover all the contras published up to 1953.

For each dance, I have the following info:

Publication Info
This consists of a book (or newsletter) identifier and a page number (or dance number, if they're numbered). Eventually, I'll have the full publication info somewhere.
Dance Title
Pretty straightforward.
Authorship
Usually this is a single author, but sometimes it's more than one, either working together or one adapting the other.
Formation
I've let myself be a bit cryptic on this.
  • Lm = "longways for as many as will"
  • Cm = "circular for as many as will"
  • L = "longways fixed set"
  • C = "circular fixed set"
And then numbers defining the composition of each (minor) set, and then optional stuff indicating whether each couple is proper or improper, and whether it's a mixer.

Note that I do not include the figures of the dances. If you're looking for on-line country dance descriptions, check my list of sources for codes that begin with 'w'.


And now, the indexes:

My list of sources, the codes I use to denote them, and my raw data files are all available here.


Website by Michael Dyck, jmdyck@ibiblio.org

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