The Dance Gypsy attempts to list as many traditional and folk dance events and services as possible — including regularly-scheduled or ongoing dances, special events such a festivals and dance camps, performers (callers, leaders, musicians, bands), organization and other dance related services. These listings are absolutely free and available to all dancers! And it is the Dance Gypsy‘s philosophy that they should remain so forever. (We do accept paid advertisements which provide even better exposure — but the basic dance listing are free, whether you advertise or not.) All listings in the Dance Gypsy are spam-protected.
Things we list:
Events involving all participatory folk and traditional dance forms (including but not restricted to: folk dance, contradances, international, English country, Scottish country, Balkan and other dance forms)
Events exclusively or partially devoted to dance: dances, festivals, camps, vacations:
For New England, we attempt to list all dances.
For the rest of the country, we list only the special events and festivals (See Festival Planner below)
People who perform at dances: musicians, callers, leaders, instructors.
Bands who play for dances.
Organizations that promote or sponsor traditional dance.
Things we normally do not list:
Although many other people and things are dance–related and important to many members of the dance community, we just can't list everything. In general the watchwords are “participatory” and “traditional”. Thus we do not normally list:
Non-participatory dances such as a dance concert.
Dances not open to our intended audience: “Dance Gypsies.” This might preclude dances:
which require subscribing to an entire dance series
a short term lesson series for which participants are expected to attend all sessions.
with admission as couples only
with harsh dress codes (e.g. coat and tie required)
with extremely high admission fees (e.g. $50 for an evening)
Events which although of interest to the dance community (e.g., fiddle or traditional instrument concert) include no actual participatory dancing.
Dances of a non-traditional nature such as rock or contact improv.
Dance events outside of the US and Canada (except trips or vacations aimed at American audiences).
Musicians and bands who do not play for dances or who do not play for traditional dances.
Event listings:
We maintain two primary lists of dance events — each with its own philosophy
The Dance Gypsy Dance Calendar includes regularly-scheduled or ongoing (e.g., weekly, monthly) events — for the New England area only. (Specifically, we cover all of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont, plus nearby areas of New York, and Quebec). Events in this list normally occur once or more each month. These events are normally one evening in length. Basic information such as time price and location usually stays the same from month to month. But selected items such as caller, instructor or band may change each week or month. These events can be looked up by date, state, dance style, or week of the month. They are also cross indexed in the performer sections.
The Dance Gypsy Festival Planner lists special events such as festivals, dance camps, holiday dances, all night dances, etc. Generally this means multiple-day events that occur either annually or as a one-shot event. Unlike the old Dance Gypsy Summer Planner, the Festival Planner list events for the entire year.
Note: the Dance Gypsy does show its New England bias in one way here: for the New England area we include single-evening special events (such as the Brattleboro Dawn Dance or Peterborough Thanksgiving Dance) in the Festival Planner. For the rest of the country, special events usually (but not quite always) are restricted to multi-day events. The concept here is that we are New England-based and we are listing dances that someone might want to plan ahead to make a special trip to attend. People are not likely to travel hundreds of miles to attend a single evening event (unless it is really special). These one day New England events also appear in the Regular Dance Calendar for the given month.
Performer Listings
We will list any caller, instructor, leader, musician or band that plays for dances. Normally we attempt to find out basic information for any person or group that appears at dances listed in either of the dance listing sections, but we are happy to list performers even of they do not appear at events covered in the Dance Gypsy (assuming they do appear at similar events).
What information we need:
Please include at least the basic information:
Town and state
Venue (building name such as Grange or Town Hall and address)
Dance type (e.g., contra, Cajun)
Performers (caller, band, instructor, or ...) (please indicate when this is a standing house band or caller)
Date and time
Regular price (note: this should be the price for an outsider showing up without an advanced ticket)
Special info (e.g. pot luck beforehand)
Contact information (name, phone number and/or Email address, web sites)
Dance vacation (months when the series does not meet)
Addition special information such as the frequent admonition to “Please wear soft soled shoes.”
If you know the band members and believe the Dance Gypsy may not yet have them within our data base, feel free to provide them too (once in our data base, they are automatically added to dances whenever they play).
Note: Yes, we can get your information off your web page (if we know it), but it takes probably 10 to 20 times longer the to find and extract all the details than it does from a nice Email. And we now list almost 400 regularly scheduled dances and a similar number of festivals. Bottom line: it is much much easier for us if you can actually send us the info. If everyone says to me: “just get it off the web site,” we will never be able to finish the job. It really does require the co-operation off everyone. Once your listing is established, monthly updates are normally straight forward involving only an item or two.
We will also list notices of canceled or rescheduled events.
How to submit it:
You may submit the information by whatever means you wish, but the Gypsy‘s preferences are Email:
Please send material for your event by the 15th of the month prior to the event. Thus, for a dance on February 23, please get the material to us by January 15th.
You may send information for your Festival or special event at any time — the earlier the better. We can list your event as much as 11 months before its date.
For reference: a typical listing in the calendar looks something like:
General Schedule: first Fridays (Sep-Jul). (Last Updated on: 8/7/2004.)
(In the calendar, the date appears prior to the first event for each given date)
A typical entry in the Festival Planner looks like:
Buffalo on the Danube
Friday, August 30 - Monday, September 2, 2002: Capon Bridge, WV
International Dance Camp ~ Featuring: Steve and Susan Kotansky —Romanian and Transylvanian dances Roo Lester and Larry Harding — Swedish and Norwegian dances Monique Legare — Balkan dances Larry Weiner
Location: Buffalo Gap Camp
Cost: $275 (includes meals and lodging)
For more information: (phone): (301) 320-7099 ; (E-mail):
Once I have your dance in my data base, I will send you a monthly request via Email for information for the following month. You need only provide the changes or special information each month. If we don‘t have your Email address, please send it to us. (If you think we have it but you don‘t get a reminder, that probably means we don‘t really have it.)
Spam protection
We all hate spam, but musicians, bands callers and dance organizers do need to keep their Email addresses public. This means that spammers can and do harvest their Email addresses from Email lists, corporate transactions — and, yes, from web pages.
The Dance Gypsy uses an internal representation that protects the many listings contained within these pages from spammers. For human reader, these are in visible. All Email addresses are visible without having to translate them in your head (e.g., changing “at” to “@”, deleting the “nospam”, etc.). All addresses are dynamic links that cause your Email program to start a message to the performer or dance they are interested in (without having to go through a series of extra links). But they are invisible to almost any spam harvesting program!
How this protection is provided: All addresses are “munged,” that is they are altered so that their form differs from that expected by harvesting programs. Harvesting programs expect to find keywords such as the “@”, which human users can see, and special internal or invisible words such as “mailto” and “href”. The Dance Gypsy‘s web pages do not use these special symbols. If you wish to see the distinction, find a real Email address on this page and a similar reference within some other web page at another site. Select “view frame source” from your browser‘s menus. You should be able to find text within all the arcane words that resembles the address in question, but you will not find the address in the Dance Gypsy‘s pages.
