If you are not a contra dancer, this post will be boring and meaningless. If you are a contra dancer, that might still be the case.
My dances are at www.dance.ravitz.us .
1987-03 - I started dancing contra in 1987 and calling in 1995. I wanted every dance that I called to have a partner swing. And along the way I added other rules, so it became apparent that I needed to write some new dances. Becky Hill called a dance in Cincinnati and had her first book of dances for sale. It was well organized, readable, and had an interesting set of rules that Becky followed. That was my entry in writing dances.
1995-07 - Starburst - a nice flowy dance. Interesting enough to not need a neighbor swing?
1996-12 - Maliza's Magical Mystery Motion - this was written for Maliza's birthday. Her mother suggested Petronella turns and a Beatles related name. She must have suggested Magical Mystery Tour or I think I would have aimed in a different direction. It turned out well - easy but unusual, a very popular dance.
1997-02 - Whitewater - my first dance that progresses with your neighbor, then with your shadow, then unprogresses with your second neighbor to find your partner. Many more followed.
1997-02 - Whitewater has a pictorial story. The waves lapping at the shore - long lines, roll away, long lines, roll away. Then into the current - circle, swing the next. And more swirls - circle, allemande. To a beautiful landing - balance and swing.
1997-05 - named for Lexington, KY's dance weekend, Dance Trance.
1997-06 - Flying Flamingos - from a dance weekend, wedding celebration at Buffalo Gap, WV, with (plastic) pink flamingos everywhere.
1997-07 - Sealed With a Keith - Keith Cornett asked me for a lost and found contra dance. I arrived at River Falls, SC very early one time and sat by the creek thinking about this. I had done a number of these dances and wanted something different. How about lost and found and lost and found? It took just a few minutes to complete. And another few minutes to think of a fun name (if you are too young to get the reference, check out the song Sealed with a Kiss).
1997-11 - Pigtown Petronella - after Maliza's MMM, I realized that two Petronella and turn to face the next is more magical. An almost identical dance, but chain on the left diagonal and turn an extra 1/2 after both Petronella turns.
1998-01 - Roadkill - for Sherri Hadley's band Grits and Roadkill Possum Gravy. Roadkill has multiple individual progressions, similar to Whitewater, but it does it with two symmetric sequences. Simple figure sequence, complex progression. (Later - Starcrossed, Megadance, Where Will I be.)
1998-01 - Snake in the Hey - one of my favorites. With ladies allemande to a wavy line in the middle. A good example of a dance that is interesting enough to not need a neighbor swing.
1998-09 - Dancing Spell - from Mr. Tambourine Man, Bob Dylan (via Melanie Safka cover).
1998-12 - Rat Race and The Enchanted Forrest - two of several dances that I wrote with synchronous allemandes in the middle. (Forrest is spelled correctly, a wonderful dancer from Asheville and The Enchanted Forrest was her business). The name "eggbeater" for the allemande figure sequence is from Bill Olson. The suggestion that this sequence takes a lot of space is wrong. With accurate timing, it takes no extra space. My original dance was called Pinwheels, my preferred name for the allemande sequence.
1999-01 - Four on the Floor - with synchronous Rory O'More balance and slides in the middle. If you slide the wrong way - crash. Four on the floor is another double meaning - in my youth, the performance car transmission was a four speed manual with stick shift mounted on the floor instead of the steering column. I owned just one such car, a 1979 VW Scirocco. Four speeds gave way to five speeds for better highway cruising after that. And steering column shifters disappeared. So there was never a "five on the floor", which doesn't have the right ring. Of course the other meaning is the contra dance minor set.
1999-04 - Whirl of Fortune - my favorite pun title. This is my first usage of a bounce back hey. Using the flourish of bouncing back twice (for either role) in a hey seems pointless as a called figure - the dancers can do it whether called or not. My usage here is ladies bounce back in the first half, gents bounce back in the second half - a very nice sequence.
1999-05 - Woven Waves - a dance with two new figures that works beautifully. I was in Louisville and danced one of the dances where ladies go into the middle, then back out while gents go into the middle. And I wondered - why do the ladies have to back out. Now how to I get out of the interlinked waves. It was pretty easy, turn the modified star - I called it a gypsy star because your are facing your partner. It seemed too simple. But I couldn't find a better way. And then I realized I was being stupid. My new choreography rule - a dance should be as simple as possible while encompassing the goals that I have set.
1999-05 - Woven Waves - I wanted to be able to call a lot of my dances in one evening, so I didn't want to keep using my favorite progression - circle left 3/4, pass through, do-si-do. So I used ladies chain, star left. Then I decided that each dance that I write should be as good as possible, so I switched it. But I have to be more careful when choosing dances.
1999-05 - Woven Waves - One of the Cincinnati dancers has a party every spring, with dancing. So I brought this dance for its first try. Joseph Pimentel was up right before me and called his new dance, Ramsay Chase, which included a ladies go into the middle, ladies back out and men go in. Sigh. I decided that Woven Waves was different enough and called it. As I watched one of the wonderful Cincinnati dancers dance the gypsy star, I knew the dance would be a success. The caller community has renamed gypsy star to "facing star" - blech.
1999-12 - Breakup Breakdown, Martha's Breakup Breakdown - Breakup Breakdown refers to the dance, so you end up with your neighbor. In Martha's Breakup Breakdown the Breakup breaks down, so you end up with your partner.
2000-04 - Dance Kentucky Unhinged - for Darlene Underwood, using her initials.
2000-10 - Through the Looking Glass - I wrote this at Darlene Underwood's request for a dance to call at the Looking Glass dance weekend (Lansing, MI). When I wrote a simplified version, I chose the Blondie (the band) title Heart of Glass. More Blondie titles - Dreaming, One Way or Another, Atomic, Call Me (my favorite easy dance).
2001-06 - Reflections - the goal was a dance with 64 count instructions that alternated between improper and reverse improper. That is, no special instructions at count 65 to cause the switch. I finally found a way to do it. But it requires the dancers to remember if they are a 1 or a 2, almost ensuring a breakdown.
2002-01 - Mary Keith's Harmonium - at the February 2002 Knoxville dance weekend I had a new and untested dance, using the progression from Amy's Harmonium. Keith Cornett was the main caller and called it so I named it Mary Keith's Harmonium.
2002-09 - Whim's Gym - I wish I had named it Whim's Gem. Sigh.
2003-05 - Reel to Reel - from Dreaming (Blondie), and tape recorders before cassettes. Also Reel to Unreal and Reel to Surreal.
2003-05 - Reel to Reel - Ron Buchanan sent me a few new dances, probably 1996, maybe 1997. One had a rotate the waves sequence. If you look in The Caller's Box, Harvest Moon, it refers you to American Dance Circle for a write-up. But the write-up makes no sense. I don't have the note that Ron sent so I can't be specific, but I thought the timing was poor. Best to allemande 1 in the middle with a 1/2 orbit in 6 counts (see Amy's Harmonium). This also relieves crowding in the middle. I eventually decided to write a dance to my specs, which I am very happy with. There are now a number of similar dances, mostly with allemande 1+1/2 in the middle with a 1/2 orbit in 8 counts - not good.
2008-02 - Passion Breakdown - Paschen breakdown occurs when the voltage across two conductors separated by air is high enough to ionize the N2 and O2 molecules, making the air conductive - lightning. That's why the dancers walk straight across the set after the mad robin. Of course this is passion breakdown, not Paschen breakdown. Or maybe it's the same thing.
2008-07 - Wildflowers, Chicory, Trillium, Galax - all use allemande 1, butterfly whirl 1+1/2, hey, balance and swing. Much relaxed compared to dances that allemande 1+1/2. I took the progression in the whirl from Charlie Harvey's Amy Asked for a gypsy, easier here with extra time. Chicory was Martha Edward's band after Stringdancer.
2009-08 - Around the Sound - after calling at the Chehalis dance weekend on the Puget Sound.
2009-08 - Autumn Air - a nice double meaning for Air.
2010-06 - Living in Zen - for Liz.
2010-12 - Where Will I Be - from the song by Daniel Lanois, on Emmylou Harris's album Wrecking Ball, my favorite album.
2011-09 - March of the Coffee Zombies, to go with Tom Cunningham's great tune. Another story dance. Wake up, get out of bed - long lines, roll away. To the coffee machine - the zombie march. The coffee machine - wavy lines, balance and slide. Awake - swing. Normality returns - allemande, swing.
2011-11 - Mad Max - Janet's first dog.
2012-01 - Songbird - Janet sent me Rough Ride by Tom Hinds. It used mad robin, half poussette, progress, mad robin, half poussette. She suggested that I put the sequence in a different setting. I changed the timing and later changed it to mad robin, half poussette, progress, half poussette, mad robin. A couple of weeks later, we attended an Emmylou Harris concert, and I named my new dance Songbird.
2012-03 - Fiddler's Frolic - for Fred and Pam Stoll, two great fiddlers, upon leaving Cincinnati. Fred and later Pam played with Brittany Bay. Pam played with Stringdancer. Both wonderful contra dance bands.
2012-03 - Star's End - from Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels, ends the two stars similarly but differently.
2013-04 - Into the DMZ - the DMZ is the Dugan Murphy Zone, not the more common usage.
2013-05 - Cross contra formation - some of these have been danced, but not really caught on. I called a cross contra dance workshop at Dance Trance 2017 - Cross Robin, Cross Hey, Across Nottingham B, Fatal Attraction. Four very unusual dances and I had not previously called any of them. It went well.
2013-05 - Cross contra formation - I wondered why cross contra formation had not been tried before and came to this conclusion - for contra and other dances with major set formations, the major sets are not composed of individual dancers, they are composed of couples. If you build a major set of couples (two people side by side), you will never get to cross contra, because it separates partners. It is one of those rules that you don't realize exist until you break them.
2014-01 - Dance and Dream - a phrase from My Father by Judy Collins (I know it by Melanie Safka's cover).
2014-03 - Bill Pope and Judy Goldsmith wrote a dance that has become very popular - Cows Are Watching. The novel feature is a zigzag to a gents allemande in the middle to a neighbor swing. There are three other similar possibilities - the ladies do the allemande, and the gents or the ladies allemande to a partner swing - Cows are Watching Variation, Turtles Too, and And Alligators.
Incidentally, if I capitalize "Variation" in a title, I consider it part of the title and I attach my name to the dance. If it is a simple variation, I don't capitalize it and keep the original author.
2015-08 - Adrift - no special thoughts except that this is one of my favorite dances.
2016-12 - Reddie to Roll - Reddie was a sweet old dog, deaf and arthritic, that Janet rescued from being put to sleep. He had two main hobbies, running, when his arthritis was not too bad, and attempting, unsuccessfully, to kill small white dogs.
2018-12 - Valley of Fire, Toward the San Rafael Swell, At the Swell - for Janet's move to Utah.
2021-04 - Atomic, Wavelet, Darlene's Roll - near the end of the COVID mess, I decided that singlets had more use than just Zoom dances. If you want to dance as a group, but minimize spreading an airborne disease, how about minimizing close neighbor interaction. You could eliminate neighbor swings or you could eliminate neighbors. I offered variations on a number of dances to change neighbor swings to allemandes and I wrote three singlets. The singlets are not adaptations of regular contras. They introduce new features. None of this caught on. But they still could be useful for dances with a small number of participants.
2024-08 - Jaded - for Jade's birthday, the lady who won't smile. Just kidding. She lights up the room with her smile.
2024-08 - Jaded - my first usage of a bounce across in a hey. Here and in Seven Stars, Entwined, I use it with different symmetries in more traditional dances.
2024-10 - Seven Stars - Devan's seven children, who played major roles in restarting contra dancing in Lexington, KY after the COVID shutdown.
2026-08 - Batter, Bitter - I wanted to write a simple dance with 1/2 hey, ladies chain across, 1/2 hey. Done. Bob Isaacs pointed out that my dance was just Gene Hubert's Butter with the chain moved. Butter has been around for as long as I have been calling, one source dates it at 1990. Hard to believe that no one suggested a variation with 1/2 hey, chain, 1/2 hey instead of chain, hey. I looked to see if this had already been written. Not that I could find. I considered calling it Better, but I didn't want the name to imply that it was better than Butter. So Batter. And inverting the partner and neighbor roles - Bitter.
2026-08 - That bring things to the present. I hope more stories far into the future.
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