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Contra dance festival regains its step in Juneau with inaugural Rainforest Romp
- Mark Sabbatini
- 8 hours ago
- 6 min read
Three-day event through Sunday part of effort to bring new life to 17th-century folk frolic that hits its heyday in Juneau starting in the late 1980s
By Mark Sabbatini
Juneau Independent
Odette Foster has seen contra dancing go through lots of swings in Juneau during nearly 40 years as a participant and caller.
It hit a popularity peak starting in the late 1980s, ebbed from a weekly to a monthly event about 15 years ago, and temporarily halted with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. She’s hoping a first-ever three-day festival that began Friday is part of an upturn that includes a new crowd of younger participants.
"The last dance we had 95 people and a whole bunch of them were summer workers," she said.
A somewhat smaller crowd showed up on a warm and sunny Friday evening for the start of the Rainforest Romp Contra Dance Weekend at St. Ann's Parish Hall. It’s the debut of what organizer Daniel Martin said he hopes becomes an annual event similar in spirit to a yearly camp last held in 2019.
"We had the momentum to make it happen," he said, noting about 60 to 80 people are now participating in the monthly dances, and he was able to lure a two-person band and guest caller he met last year at the Northwest Folklife festival in Seattle to be the featured performers at the event.
Rainforest Romp Contra Dance Weekend schedule (Saturday and Sunday)
– Saturday caller/dancer/musician workshops: 12:30-2 p.m. and 2:15-2:45 p.m. St. Ann's Parish Hall.
– Saturday evening dance: 8-11 p.m. St. Ann's Parish Hall.
– Sunday English Country Dance: 10 a.m. to noon at the Raven Yoga Shala, in the Arcticorp Building across the street from St. Ann’s.
– Sunday Contra Finale: 2-5 p.m. St. Ann's Parish Hall. Full festival schedule and ticket information.
The evening saw a mix of experienced and new dancers form long lines of couples facing each other along the length of the floor, following the caller through a progression of swings, weaves and other moves that resulted in a constantly shifting set of partners. It’s a key social element of the dance form — there’s no need to arrive with a partner and participants who arrive as a couple will spend much of the evening swinging with other folks.
"In college we would take a van full of like 40 students down an hour and a half away to the nearest contra dance," said Jenna Schlener, who learned about such dances from her husband, Ronan McWilliam, when they were both living in New England before the pandemic. They moved to Juneau three years ago and have been regulars at the local dances since.
"I think it's a good mix, actually," Schlener said. "I’m always delightfully surprised at these contra dances. There's some young folks dancing with babies in their arms and there’s (people) at the other end of the spectrum."
Foster is one of the pioneers of contra dancing in Juneau, helping start local events in the late 1980s that saw community involvement hit a peak for a period of years after.
"Those were really special circumstances we did," she said. "We started out with a Thursday night contra every week at Capital School and we had a band that would play. It was just one of those magical things that just doesn't happen that often."
Contra dances also proved popular each year at the Alaska Folk Festival and in 1993 an annual Camp Damp began hosting a weekend of activities at Argetsinger Methodist Camp out the road. The last camp was in 2019 before the pandemic hit.
"It was such a huge effort," Foster said. "It was a really special thing because we made meals together and everything. It had such a communal feel to it."
Martin said he first discovered contra dancing about 20 years ago while living on the East Coast and gradually got more involved in Juneau after moving here in 2009.
"I've been going to the dances on and off for a bunch of years, but I was more into other kinds of dancing, and then it was about two years ago that I got involved seriously with helping these guys organize," he said.
Performing music during this weekend’s festival is Raven & Goose, a duo of fiddle player Corwin Zekley and pianist Grace Fellows who’ve been on the road nonstop for the past two years, playing at about 80 to 100 dances each year.
Fellows said they met in California in 2019 and were living in the United Kingdom while she got her master’s degree. Both were longtime musicians and decided on tour performances for a couple of months upon their return to the U.S., but kept going because they couldn’t decide on a place to settle down.
"Every day on tour is novelty, but it's like within a certain range of expectation if it's planned and you know what generally is going to happen," Zekley said. "So even if you don't know the specifics of how a night is going to be, or what it's going to be like, or how the sound will be, or the type of people you're going to meet, what the venue is like, et cetera, you generally know what vaguely to expect."
Some of the couple’s songs are originals, but there’s also "many, many, many thousands of lovely tunes out there already, so it doesn't have to be all originals," he said. The music, like the dances, continues in a cycle that typically lasts eight to 15 minutes — and there’s a break after each dance to explain the next one — which keeps the setlist even for a multi-hour evening to a manageable length.
The guest caller for the inaugural Rainforest Romp is Koren Wake, a New England native who now lives in Seattle, who said she quit her day job at a software company a couple of months ago.
"I was working for a startup, and then it got acquired by a giant corporation and the job changed significantly," she said.
Wake said she’s been dancing since she was a kid, but learned to be a caller soon after the pandemic when participants were rusty at one of the first dances she was at when they resumed.
"The floor had more chaos than we would normally expect and I was one of the people on the floor, sort of keeping things in hand, calling a little bit from the line," she said. The official organizer noticed her, and soon she was training and calling dances for real.
"It's keeping me pretty busy. I'm taking as many gigs as I can," Wake said.
Her primary equipment as a caller is a microphone and a box with hundreds of index cards with dances. Like the music, the dances vary in complexity based on the type and number of moves in a sequence, so knowing the experience level of the participants is important, Wake said.
"They all more or less work with music that has the same structure, and I communicate with the band about what tunes are going to go best with the particular dances that I'm about to do," she said. "Does it have sort of stompy moves, or is it smooth? Do you want the music to tell people to float or to stomp, or what's the feeling that we're looking for?"
For the Juneau event, Wake said she expects a mix of experienced and new dancers.
"So I want to make sure that the program is accessible for everybody," she said. "Anybody could join us. And I will help them have a good time and so will all of the experienced dancers."
Foster said the dance gatherings themselves haven’t changed much over the decades, although plenty of organizational aspects have — such as using social media rather than mail to let people know about events. She said that makes the enthusiasm of younger organizers such as Martin as well as newer participants vital to its ongoing presence in Juneau.
"Daniel has been a mover and a shaker, and he's brought a lot of young people," she said.
While contra dancing roots date back to English country dances of the 1600s, Wake said it’s also an experience of discovery.
"Contra dancing is joy," she said. "It is a way to connect with your community and with music and with your body. It is exercise and mental stimulation and social connection, and it's just plain fun to see those patterns start to work. You start out really confused. How is this going to tell? How is this going to come together? What's right? What's left? And then it comes together and the pattern starts to make sense. And the color drops back, and all you've got is the music and the dancers around you. And you realize that ‘Actually I can do this. This does make sense.’"
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at editor@juneauindependent.com or (907) 957-2306.
