Contra Dance Lengths

January 31st, 2023
contra
There was recently some discussion on how many minutes callers typically run a contra dance, with a lot of "well, it depends" answers. There's a place for that, but I think it's also helpful to have some numbers. I went back over the last ten evenings where I have recordings:

It looks like 8-9min is pretty common. How much variability is there within an evening?

Most callers stayed between 6.5min and 12.5min: one ran two dances shorter than that; another ran eight longer (in two evenings). If you're going to run dances much over or under 8-9min it's good to warn the band so they can plan.

These were all 3hr evenings, and the callers called 8-12 dances. Two of the evenings with 12 dances had a square: those were shorter (4:51, 4:59) and I didn't count them above. This makes 2/106 squares, well down from 14/19 in 1965. Including the squares, here's the relationship between number of dances and dance length, inversely proportional as you'd expect:

Referenced in: Notes on Tony Parkes' "Contra Dance Calling"

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, mastodon, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

The odds are good and the goods are great

I stole the title and thesis of this post from the great etirabys and arguably I should just link her post.

via Thing of Things August 31, 2026

Bug blindness

I used to wonder why I see so many more bugs than most people. I easily observe hundreds to thousands of bugs per week and nothing seems to work, but most people I talk to don't see anything like this. For a long time, I thought this had something to …

via Posts on August 30, 2026

Microfictions 2

A few more microfictions, still no LLMs.

via Evan Fields August 7, 2026

more     (via openring)