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Production Funding of Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank of Bemidji continuing their second century of service to the community member FDIC.

Welcome to Common Ground, I'm producer director Scott Knutson on this week, part one of Bemidji Contra Dance!

Contra Dance is really a fun community participatory dance.

It's community building while having fun and moving in time to the music.

There is something really wonderful about all moving together in the same way and time to the music and so it's about building community as much as it is about dancing and wonderful music.

So I hope that we'll all move forward with that in mind.

Inaudible Inaudible Inaudible Inaudible Inaudible Inaudible Thank you, I'm Wendy Greenberg.

I've been Contra Dancing for a long time.

Several decades.

I've been calling because Contra Dance requires a caller like square dancing, although it's easier.

Contra Dance is always done to live music, which is something I really love about it and when we moved to Bemidji, goodness a little over 20 years ago, we looked around and said "Oh I hope we can Contra Dance here", my husband and I because that's how we met and we love to keep doing it.

Way early on, with my daughter in a little backpack, I ran a little Community Ed Contra Dance class and we had some people who really liked it, but there was not a way to do a regular monthly dance.

Until a few years ago, we tried a few times one off and it was just hard because we didn't have the next one ready.

They said this was fun and when is the next one?

We said I'm not sure.

So it never took off until a little over two years ago.

I wrote a Region Two Art Council Grant proposal and it was funded.

So we were up and running with six months worth of dances at Rail River Folk School and also musician workshops with our visiting musicians at Headwaters School of Music and Arts.

Because live music is a critical component to Contra Dancing.

We were looking to build a local Contra Dance community and also local musicians that were willing to play.

So, in the meantime, I imported musicians from Duluth and East Grand Forks.

They came in and ran an afternoon workshop with our local musicians.

We have wonderful local musicians they were just not used to playing for a Contra Dance and so we'd have these afternoon workshops before every single monthly dance.

Then those musicians that participated were allowed to come and participate a little bit and play in with the visiting band.

The idea was, in the long run we would create a local band or at least a group of musicians who would play for some of our dances in the future and that has happened.

Now we've been going on and off for a little over two years and we have had local musicians play for a few of our dances.

So, big success!

Live music is so much a part of Contra Dancing that I built that right into our funding and we're at a point in the rural area that it's very hard to keep a dance running and pay musicians something real as opposed to a donation or contribution level, so we need grant funding to help us get through.

But, we also need community participation and we're still working on building all that.

Contra Dance is really a community participation dance.

It's not designed as a performance type of dance and it's not something you have to take lessons to be able to learn beforehand.

Everything is taught on site.

The caller works with whatever skill level we have.

If there's a lot of kids, I will call for something that's kid friendly.

If there's a lot of people who've done it before, I'll pick something a little more sophisticated.

If there's a whole mix, that's actually really great, because those that have done it before help those that haven't done it before.

I teach the individual types of moves, like a ladies chain or long lines forward and back and each dance before we do it.

I take five to ten minutes to teach it and walk through it and then we fire up the band and I keep calling.

I tell them I do it one time through the music, one time through the dance.

If you miss something the first time, you'll get lots more chances.

The main idea is to have fun and all be dancing together to live music, so it brings out the community and pulls people together.

People tell me that was a lot of fun and actually it was pretty good exercise.

Also, there's not a lot of participation.

You know community participatory dancing going on and we have a few other things.

A lot more of it, is you take classes, you perform and that kind of thing , which is also wonderful!

but this is just come on in and we're all just going to dive in and do it right now and and have a great time and set to live music.

So it is all about community and therefore it's wonderful for our community!

Mostly, we start with musicians who are already playing the music in the right approximate genre.

Like I said it's kind of in the range of bluegrass to celtic thereabouts.

Then we have to get them used to playing not a set amongst themselves where they just communicate with each other.

But, were they actually steady enough playing for a Contra Dance.

The biggest adjustment that most musicians have to make is to go from playing a set for themselves or an audience to playing for a dance is they have to play quite a bit longer about twice or more as long.

In a beginning level or a community Contra Dance that's just starting up, they will run six to eight minute sets and that's quite a bit longer in a more sophisticated more advanced Contra Dance where the dancers are used to dancing quite a bit longer and the dances are more experienced then the sets will run 10 to 12 minutes.

So running a set that long, communicating with each other and communicating with the caller because the caller is really the liaison between the music and the dancers.

So as the caller, I'm calling a dance and I'm keeping it in time to the music.

They have to give me an intro that works for the dance not just that works for them, so we usually ask for the four potatoes which is not an intro they're used to doing but not that hard to pick up and then the tempo has to be dead steady.

We can't just be all over the place.

We can't stick in an extra lick to make it interesting because that throws us off in the dance and they really have to keep playing until the caller cues that we're ready to do it two more times through and we're going to be done.

So, sometimes with musicians that are not used to playing for Contra I have to almost not look at them when they're saying "so are we done yet" and I'm "no not just yet" because we want to run the dance one time through the music and one time through the dance.

The idea is that the dancers do it enough so they're getting the hang of it, so if we run it just four or five times through they may have just almost gotten the hang of it and now we're done.

Well that's pretty frustrating, so I want to run it past the point where it's hard, past the point where it seems stressful and into the point where "oh I'm getting this" and now "I'm just going to relax and do this to the music with the next people in line".

Then we have to do that for a while.

I'm Tom O'Neill.

I'm a retired faculty member of the University of North Dakota.

These days, what I do is take care of our acreage here.

We have about 40 acres and a house.

We also do play some music and this is something that we've done for years and years and I started out playing music in the folk music era in the 1960s and 70s.

I started playing guitar then towards the end of the 1970s I became much more interested in music traditional tunes that were in the bluegrass and folk tradition also but were dance tunes and it's hard to play those kind of tunes on the guitar.

The picking is pretty tough and I like the fiddle tunes so I actually started playing the fiddle in the late 1970s and have been playing that kind of music ever since.

My name is Jean O'Neil.

I've been involved with dancing and music since I was a little girl and now currently I would say I'm a dance caller and a musician and also an art teacher in the area.

I play banjo and concertina, english concertina, small squeeze box, people might call it.

I started out as a penny whistle player though.

We play for Contra Dances around the area and a few years ago we were playing for a dance over in Duluth and Wendy Greenberg and her husband Mark were visiting Duluth and attending that Contra Dance and they talked to us after the dance and said that they were interested in trying to get some Contra Dancing going in the Bemidji area where they were from.

We said that we would be quite happy to help.

Whatever we could do to make that happen.

Within some months or a year or so, I started organizing and acquired some funding and a venue to run Contra Dances and learned to call Contra Dances in the Bemidji area.

She said there's a great venue in Bemidji called the Rail River Folk School and it's an old fruit storage place for the trains.

I think she said, so it has good wood floors and wood walls and she's just like I need to have a dance going on in there but I don't have any musicians.

Then later she contacted us and they needed some people to help them teach their musicians how to play for their dances.

So we said "well yeah we could we could do that".

The process of making a dance band for traditional dancing work, having people learn to play with each other and learn to play the traditional tunes is really a folk process.

People just get together and play their instruments and trade tunes.

Different musicians will learn different tunes.

A lot of times the tunes are learned by ear and you don't necessarily have sheet music to work with, so that's what I mean by the folk process of learning to play as a group with the traditional music, especially for dancing.

Contra Dance is a specific type of traditional dance and it requires a particular length of tune and has to have the right number of parts for the tune to work with the dance.

Because the dances are 32 bars long.

They have a first part and a second part and in the Contra Dance you dance with your partner through the whole dance once with another couple and then when you're through the dance once, there's a move and the move will change.

Every different dance will have a different way this happens but you'll switch to a new couple, so you'll move down the line and you'll be dancing the whole dance with a different couple.

The dancers and the caller can cue to the fact that the dance tune is starting over and they start becoming familiar with "oh there's that run" or "that part of the tune" and that means we're in the right place.

Even if they don't know it consciously.

So, you have to play the right length of tune and it has to switch in the right place.

So, the musicians want to switch tunes and sometimes they'll switch twice.

Sometimes they'll play a tune through seven times and then they'll switch to a different tune and play that eight times and then they'll switch to another tune and play that until the end of the dance and sometimes they'll switch keys to just give a lift to the dance.

Or suddenly it goes from a minor to a major or something exciting like that or the tempo doesn't change but somehow the number of notes in there you know something changes.

But anyway, that was one of the things we had to talk to the people about that we were teaching.

But, first we had to teach a couple tunes because the format was going to be that they were going to learn maybe two or three tunes and then that night they would play those two or three tunes with us on the stage and then the rest of the dance we would be playing on our own.

Partly because an important part of learning to play for dancing is to dance.

So we highly encourage those new musicians to come to the dance and dance because if you don't dance it's really kind of hard to know how it should feel or why it should feel the way you want it to feel.

To work with totally new musicians you first have to get a feel.

The first thing I think you have to get a feel.

The first thing I think we did as I recall is to go around and introduce ourselves and and talk about what kind of music they had been playing or why they wanted to learn this or what they expected.

So, with that in mind, we moved forward and so here's our first tune.

Does anybody want to try to learn the melody because we weren't using sheet music?

Because traditionally, you don't.

We don't play by music.

We play by ear.

So for us to try to teach a group of people to play tunes on sheet music would be kind of counterproductive.

We did bring chord sheets and so we needed to first ask if there was anybody that wanted to learn the melody lines and if so then we would have to go through the melody very slowly and so that they could get the notes.

There were a few people that wanted to work on at least a couple.

So we we would go through them kind of note by note and then you have to speed it up and then they're not going to get all the notes maybe but at least they have them in their head.

Then we went through the chords with everybody and like this is where the chord should change but of course what chords you use for tunes is a variable.

It doesn't have to always be exactly the same, like a minor can replace a major or there may be a question about whether a c or a g is best in that spot.

Depending on how you want it to feel.

So we did actually talk about that a little bit too because to give the music a certain lift there are certain things you can do with the chord structure that will help it be more danceable or more rhythmic.

So we tried to pick good chords and teach them those chords and of course you want everybody to play the same chord.

If you know whatever you choose, you want everybody to do that, so a lot of the musicians that came were just going to be playing chords.

When you're working with musicians that are just starting up and they're just trying to get this, to become proficient at playing for a Contra Dance.

Some of these people are already musicians but they expect to play from sheet music and they read music whereas we pretty much play by ear, so for us in particular to interact with other musicians, we rely on their ability at least somewhat be able to play tunes just from hearing them and they have to tolerate us when we try to read slowly from sheet music if necessary.

So, that's one thing that sometimes gets in the way of people getting together to form a band.

The bottom line with Contra Dance band for me would be does this music make you want to dance?

That's our whole goal and as musicians, why do we play this kind of music and not other kinds of music?

This is a way of sharing the music and getting feedback.

Having people participate in your performance rather than just sit and listen to your performance.

And for me, as a musician, I think for a lot of musicians, if they can sense the audience engagement like that in the music and feel the music the way the musicians are feeling it as they play, that is a lot more satisfying than Inaudible Inaudible Inaudible Inaudible Inaudible Inaudible Inaudible Inaudible Inaudible Inaudible Inaudible Thanks for watching.

Join us again next time on Common Ground.

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