Welcome to the Dance Gypsy’s Dance and Festival Finder

[Note: to get rid of this (or any other) help window, click on the window or click again on the question mark.]

Use this tool to find any of over 500 folk, contra and traditional dance events each month. Search for dances according to your own individual needs — by any combination of date, location, distance from home, dance style or series name. If you wish, the form will even keep track of your dance choices for next time you visit.

The simplest search (if you specify no options at all) will find all dances within the next week (typically 1-200 events).

Quicksearch will open a calendar from which you can select a single day’s events: select the “Quicksearch” button and then the day you want.

You may also select dances using any combination of dates, locations, distances from home, dance styles and event names.

The “suppress maps” option is useful if you expect a large number of events and/or if you have a slow Internet connection. The maps are at least 4 times as large at the textual results, so it does make a big difference

General guidelines:

• The default search will find all dances and festivals of any kind anywhere during the upcoming week — typically that's 150 or more events — so you will probably want to make some restrictions.
• Perhaps the most useful is the —search by distance— option. Just specify any US town and state, most larger Canadian town and province, or US zip code or Canadian postal code along with a distance — the finder will locate any dances or festivals within the given radius of the target town.
• You can further restrict the search by specifying only certain dance styles. The advanced search allows you to specify specific towns, states, regions, festivals or keywords: the search will find only those events matching the added details.
• For text specifications you may specify as many words as you wish, but only those events satisfying all words in your list will be found.
• You may specify partial names, in which case the requested words are assumed to be the leading letters of the names or words you are seeking.
• Thus, for example, all of the following will find a dance in New London:
  • New London
  • London
  • New
  • N Lon
  • N L
  • new london (it doesn't care about case)
• but it will not find misspelled names or near misses, thus
  • "Gnu london" will not work,
• In general you will do better to under-specify rather than over-specify. For example, even a popular specification like:
  • Camb
  • Eastern Mass
  • August 1 to Aug 31
• will find only about 10-20 dances — but they will probably all be relevant. On the other hand:
• “Cambrige” will find none, nor will “Cambridge”, “Western Mass”.
• If you select “remember my selections”, then once you make a search, your preferences (except for the dates, since they will certainly change) will be remembered for future searches (unless you have cookies disabled).
• You may tell it to forget your choices at any time.