How Contra Dancing Came to DC

Tessa Lachman, March 2024

Owen Kelley wrote that the square dances were started by Lou Shapiro and Steve Hickman in April 1974. A few months later, in late July 1974, the National Folk Festival was held at Wolf Trap, in Vienna, Virginia. New Hampshire contra dance caller Dudley Laufman was invited; Dudley is the caller who was the link between the very few remaining old-time New England contra dance callers and the present-day contra dance revival. He is responsible for creating the revival in New England and for spreading contra dancing across the U.S. For the National Folk Festival, he brought the Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra and some dancers to perform contra dances. I was one of about ten dancers. We performed on the main stage at Wolf Trap and gave contra dance workshops. While it is very unlikely that someone would perform contra dancing now, back then it was a totally novel dance form, unknown outside of New England. Both Lou Shapiro and Steve Hickman attended the workshops and learned about contra dancing.

In the 2007 documentary about Dudley “The Other Way Back,” by David Millstone, Steve Hickman talks about attending those contra dance workshops at Wolf Trap and the impact they had on him. It is my understanding that the workshops at the National Folk Festival were the starting point for contra dancing in DC, building on the square dances that started a few months earlier.

If you have been around contra dancing a long time, you will recognize some of the names of some of these dancers, callers, and musicians: dancing with us were Bob Dalsemer (caller, past President of the Country Song and Dance Society (CDSS) and coordinator of J. C. Campbell Folk School), Tim Van Egmond (from Swallowtail) and others. Most of the Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra had come: Bob McQuillen, Rodney and Randy Miller, Fred Breunig (Nowell Sing We Clear), Ted Levin (professor of music at Dartmouth and the co-director with Yo Yo Ma of the Silk Road Smithsonian Folklife Festival 2002), Pete Colby, April Limber, Deana Stiles and probably some others I don’t remember.

We performed the traditional New England contras, now referred to as “chestnuts.” Writing new dances was not yet a “thing.” We danced Chorus Jig, Rory O’More, Money Musk, Petronella, Haste to the Wedding, and many others.

Immediately after that festival, we drove to the Fox Hollow Folk Festival in upstate New York to perform. I learned many years later that in the audience was a little boy, David Shewmaker, along with his parents. Partway through the week, an announcement was made from the stage that President Nixon had resigned.

Two years later in 1976, I came back to DC to work for the special bicentennial three-month-long Smithsonian Folklife Festival and attended a contra dance in the basement of a church in Foggy Bottom (probably Concordia). Steve Hickman was the sole musician playing, his wife called and there were maybe 12 dancers. I returned to DC ten years later and was stunned to find hundreds dancing at Glen Echo. Wow, contra dancing really took off!

For a more comprehensive history of the Friday Night Dance and Glen Echo, see How the Friday Night Dance Came to Glen Echo Park, by Owen Kelley, edited by Lisa Miotto, 2002. Available by contacting the author at okelley@gmu.edu.