For the past decade I've been
maintaining a directory of contra dances at
trycontra.com. Mostly it just
sits there being a place you can enter your zip code and see nearby
dances, and when it gets out of date people email me.
With the pandemic, however, there were several big changes:
Lots of dances aren't coming back. Many dances are the work of
a few dedicated volunteers or just one, and it takes more energy to
get something started back up than to continue a routine.
There are lots of new dances. Especially in places where the
main dance didn't come back, people are excited to dance and will
start things to make that happen.
URLs changed. I have "SomeCityContraDance.example" in my
directory, but that domain expired and they moved to
"ContraSomeCity.example". Or left their webpage up without updating
it and the current details are actually in their FB group.
Everyone's used to this stuff being broken. No one was keeping
these sites and tools up to date when everything was shut down, and
now that things have mostly restarted people still respond to missing
dances with "shrug" and not "let's write to the maintainer".
So! I've now gone through my listings and they're as up to date as I
can reasonably make them. I'm sure I'm missing dances, though, so if
you could try your zipcode and comment with any I've missed I'd really
appreciate that!
(And while you're at it, if you see dances that should be marked
"gender-free" but aren't I'd appreciate a correction as well. Many
dances switched when coming back, and other dances have it buried on
their websites in places I missed.)
For the past decade I've been maintaining a directory of contra dances at trycontra.com. Mostly it just sits there being a place you can enter your zip code and see nearby dances, and when it gets out of date people email me.
With the pandemic, however, there were several big changes:
Lots of dances aren't coming back. Many dances are the work of a few dedicated volunteers or just one, and it takes more energy to get something started back up than to continue a routine.
There are lots of new dances. Especially in places where the main dance didn't come back, people are excited to dance and will start things to make that happen.
URLs changed. I have "SomeCityContraDance.example" in my directory, but that domain expired and they moved to "ContraSomeCity.example". Or left their webpage up without updating it and the current details are actually in their FB group.
Everyone's used to this stuff being broken. No one was keeping these sites and tools up to date when everything was shut down, and now that things have mostly restarted people still respond to missing dances with "shrug" and not "let's write to the maintainer".
So! I've now gone through my listings and they're as up to date as I can reasonably make them. I'm sure I'm missing dances, though, so if you could try your zipcode and comment with any I've missed I'd really appreciate that!
(And while you're at it, if you see dances that should be marked "gender-free" but aren't I'd appreciate a correction as well. Many dances switched when coming back, and other dances have it buried on their websites in places I missed.)