Welcome to the Dance Gypsy’s Venue 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 1000 venues known to house folk, contra and traditional dance events each month. Search for dances according to your own individual needs — by any combination of location, distance from home, or name.

Search First!the odds are very good that the venue for your event are already in the data base. For most of these we can even locate them on a map. Selecting the venue from the existing list means you won’t need to enter any information at all — just select the venue and you are done. It will also prevent future confusion: if we already know the venue and you create another one, then we have two entries for the same venue.

General guidelines:

• The default search will find all venues of any kind anywhere; that's over 1000 venues; so you will probably want to make some restrictions.
• Perhaps the most useful is the —search by distance— option. Just specify any US — or now Canadian — town and state/province, most larger Canadian town and province, or US zip cod or Canadian 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 venues matching the added details.
• For text specifications you may specify as many words as you wish, but only those venues 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 venues — 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.