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ASHINGTON'S FRIDAY NIGHT DANCE is the largest and longest-running contra dance in the area. From a modest beginning in 1974 in downtown Washington, its growth was later encouraged when it moved to the Spanish Ballroom at Glen Echo Park in the early 1980s.
Dozens of interviews with dancers, musicians, and callers reveal the kaleidoscope of experiences at the Friday night dance. Out of these interviews comes the story of how the event is sustained by a community. The members of this community collectively possess all the skills necessary to make a traditional American dance a vital part of their lives.
If you are curious about the music at contra dances or the origin of contra dance itself, you'll enjoy the essays on these and other topics that are also included this book.
"will interest many present and future dancers" Bob Dalsemer, July 2002
Country Dance and Song Society News
"of interest both historically and on a human level" Ann Fallon, August, 2002
Folklore Society of Greater Washington
"well-written. . . . attractively published" Carlotta Anderson, August, 2002
The Echo of the Town of Glen Echo
Preface 1 Introduction 3 Chronology 11
PART I: HISTORY1. The First Years (1974-1981) 15 2. The Move to Glen Echo Park (1981-1985) 35 3. The Dance Committee Takes Charge (1985-1994) 51 4. The New Volunteers (1994-2001) 71 Conclusion
93 Interlude: Photos from the Late 1990s 95
PART II: ESSAYS5. Teaching New Dancers 103 6. Tunes from the Open Band 113 7. The Figures of Selected Dances 133 8. The Origin of Contra Dance 149 9.
How Glen Echo Park Joined
the National Park System
163 Appendix A: Attendance Statistics 187 Appendix B: Maps 193 Abbreviations 198 Interviews 199 Bibliography 207 Acknowledgements 237 Index 241
IN 1974, the Friday night dance began in Washington, D.C., and since the mid-1980s, it has been by far the largest contra dance in the area. It may also be the largest weekly contra dance in the United States, but no one has seen a need to prove this. Most of the evidence is anecdotal, anyway. Local dancers, callers, and musicians visit dances in other parts of the country, but none of those interviewed for this history know of a weekly contra dance that is larger than Washington's Friday night dance.
It's just as well that it's unnecessary to prove which contra dance is the largest in the country because contra dances are autonomously organized, and no nation-wide attendance records are kept. The closest thing to definitive statistics are found in a little-known survey that Midwesterner Mac McKeever conducted in 1994. He mailed a survey form to about 300 contra dance groups across the country and 117 responded. The Friday dance, with attendance of generally 220 to 280, was larger than any of the dances that completed the survey. However, a few cities currently have or once had weekly contra dances with attendance not much different from that of Washington's Friday night dance. Therefore, very large contra dances are unusual, but they do occur.
Before examining why Washington's Friday dance grew so large, it is necessary to clarify its name. Today many dancers informally refer to it as "Friday at Glen Echo" because since the early 1980s the dance has been held most or all of the year at Glen Echo Park. It would be a mistake, however, to associate the dance exclusively with suburban Glen Echo because for six formative years most dancers called it simply "Concordia." From 1975 to 1981, the dance was held at Concordia Church in downtown Washington. At Concordia many traditions and also the atmosphere of the Friday dance were established, including the open band and welcoming new dancers.
Many people give different reasons for why Washington's Friday night dance is so popular. Some people point to the live and energetic traditional music, while others emphasize that the character of the dance form helps people to enjoy each other's company. Still others mention that the Friday dance's growth is partially due to the assortment of other contra dances and annual dance weekends that local dancers organize. It does not hurt that the Baltimore-Washington area is the fourth largest metropolitan area according to the Census Bureau, with a population of over seven million. Contra dances in other cities share many of these qualities, but few of them grow as large as Washington's Friday dance.
This history focuses on two other reasons that people give for the Friday dance's popularity: the wonderful Spanish Ballroom of Glen Echo Park and the sense of community that many regular attendees experience. As described below, the Friday dance is in a unique position because it is held in this large, affordable, and historic ballroom, administered by the National Park Service as a cultural resource. In addition, the appeal of many contra dance series comes from the sense of community that they cultivate. Maintaining that feeling is difficult, especially at large events. Repeatedly over the years, dancers have struggled to maintain the social connectedness that made the Friday dance popular from the very beginning. In fact, just a few months after the dance began, a group of friends had to rescue it because the original organizer announced that he had to leave.
In the early 1980s, participants began using the word "community" to describe the dance after attendance had grown to about a hundred people a week. By then, separate groups of dancers or musicians had formed within the pool of regular attendees, and these groups exerted an influence on the music, dance, and management of the event.
After attendance grew further in the mid-1980s, some participants became concerned that the event had become too big to be still considered a community. According to them, one sign of trouble was that, with such a large crowd, it was difficult to know the names of all the regular attendees, let alone get to know them all. Ever since the dance had started, periodically there were local dancers who wanted to contribute by learning to call or play dance music. Increasingly, these novices had difficulty competing against the long list of very skilled musicians and callers, many from out-of-town, who wanted to perform at what might be the largest weekly contra dance in the country.
While the dance community has struggled to maintain itself at the Friday dance, scholars have debated for decades how to define a community and what is needed to maintain one. Anthropologists, sociologists, and folklorists study some of the same issues that the dancers mention in the interviews cited in this history. These issues include lower and upper limits on the number of members of a community, the sharing of power by groups within the community, and to what extent a community is a self-contained group with all the skills necessary to perform the activities that the community requires.
To clarify, the dance is not the community--the dance is a weekly event where the community gathers. The community is the connections that exist between the people who regularly attend the dance. They can feel that the dance community is present even when only a subset gathers at a potluck dinner party in someone's home, a wedding, or a weekend dance camp.
In the ballroom, dancers are usually too busy dancing or talking to think about how the stories they tell give new participants a sense of the group's past and remind regular participants of what they value in it. Topics of conversation include their opinion of the dances being called, the music being played, and how the newcomers are doing that particular evening. Each of these topics is introduced in an essay in the second half of this book.
Few dancers know the details of how Glen Echo was established in the late 1800s or how dance first came to the park, but it is worth saying something about these topics here. The park's past helps to explain the odd combination of run- down buildings and modest usage fees that the Friday dancers encountered when they first started dancing there.
In 1891 the first buildings at Glen Echo were constructed as a Chautauqua summer school for the liberal arts. For one gloriously successful season, three hundred Washingtonians resided in a tent city at Glen Echo, attended lectures, concerts, and classes, and went on romantic evening walks. Although they did not dance, they did attend concerts that included waltz and polka music.
In 1891 the Washington Post declared Glen Echo to be one of the best of the approximately fifty Chautauqua assemblies that had been established since the 1870s. Taken together, the Chautauquas popularized adult education and community colleges and advanced progressive social reform. Due to financial difficulties, no Chautauqua session was held at Glen Echo in subsequent summers.
In 1897 Glen Echo became an amusement park at which social dance was a central attraction. As was typical with amusement parks back then, Washington residents considered Glen Echo Park to be a venue mostly for picnics in the country, outdoor band concerts, vaudeville shows, and evening dances in open-air pavilions. There were a carousel and a few other rides, but they were not originally the primary attraction.
From the late 1890s through the 1910s, the Washington Post reported that throngs of dancers came to the dance pavilions at a time when the waltz and two-step were popular. In 1933 the amusement park owners built the Spanish Ballroom at a time when the fashionable dances were foxtrot, waltz, one-step, and Paul Jones mixers. In the late 1930s and the 1940s, swing and jitterbug were the most popular dances.
In 1971 the National Park Service began administering the park to protect from residential development this plot of land with a heritage as a Chautauqua and a turn-of-the-century amusement park. During the early 1970s, the ballroom remained a dilapidated and rarely-used building, while art and theater groups converted other buildings into inexpensive studio and performance space.
Starting in the late 1970s, the Friday dance indirectly helped bring social dance back to the Spanish Ballroom. In 1977 Ranger Diane Leatherman decided to start the first folk dance series at the park in part because she had attended the Friday dance and met the musicians and callers there. During the summers in the early 1980s, the Friday night dance itself began to be held at the park. A few years later, the Friday dance became the first dance series, since the arrival of the National Park Service, that regularly drew more than 250 attendees.
In the mid-1990s volunteers from the Friday dance and other park programs made repairs to the ballroom floor and completed other renovation projects. In the late 1990s, hundreds of dancers from the Friday dance were among the park's vocal supporters who helped convince the county, state, and federal governments to fund over $18 million in long- delayed renovations that were needed to keep the ballroom and other historic buildings safe to use.
Glen Echo Park, in turn, assisted the Friday dance by providing the dance a space in which it could afford to continue expanding after it outgrew the various church basements that it had used prior to the mid-1980s. Few dancers realize that the National Park Service rangers assigned to Glen Echo Park have a great deal of influence on how much the Park Service charges for use of the ballroom. To encourage the cultural programs at Glen Echo, the rangers charge modest fees for use of all the park buildings, despite receiving very limited budgets from Park Service management. At Glen Echo's large ballroom, the Friday dance can continue to charge its traditionally low admission fee that encourages many people to come weekly and make the dance a part of their lives. Admission was $3.50 in 1985 and $6 in 2000, which incidentally matched inflation. With such low admission and a commitment to paying live musicians, the only other large space the dance could afford would be a gym or other warehouse-like building. In contrast, the seventy-year-old art- deco ballroom at Glen Echo has an atmosphere, even with cracked plaster walls, that no gym could equal.
The ballroom matches the sensibilities of the contra dancers, although it lacks expensive frills. When dancing in the Spanish Ballroom, one has the sense that the space was designed for social dance and generations have danced there. In addition, the ballroom has a sprung maple floor that is easier on legs than concrete floors or conventional hardwood floors. Most hardwood floors are laid directly on the sub-flooring, and so they lack the slight bounce of a sprung floor. Contra dancers seem to be the type of people who can be comfortable at a venue that lacks the amenities of more mainstream locations. The ballroom lacks air conditioning, heating, or an up-scale food and beverage service. The only restrooms are in a separate building.
In many people's accounts of the Friday dance, moving to Glen Echo Park was the pivotal event, hence the title of this book. Some people feel that the dance's heyday was before the move, and others feel it came after, but everyone agrees that the move changed the dance.
Notes1. See the appendix on page 193 for more attendance figures.
2. For example, in the fall of 2001, median attendance was 222 at the Thursday contra dance at VFW Hall in Cambridge, Ma. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, attendance was often over 300 at the Tuesday night contra dance at the Brimmer and May School in Brookline, Ma. [private communication, CDSS Director Brad Foster, 12/2001].
3. In 2002 there are three weekly contra dances in the D.C. area: Fri. and Sun. at Glen Echo Park, Md. (est. 1974 and 1975); and Wed. in downtown Baltimore (1970). Smaller monthly contra dances are held within an hour's drive of D.C.: first Sat. of the month in Shepherdstown, W.Va. (1979); second Sat. in Baltimore's suburbs (1985) and Reston, Va. (1983); third Sat. in Bluemont, Va. (1975), and Annapolis, Md. (1988); and fourth Sat. in Frederick, Md. (~1985). In addition, D.C. area dancers organize several annual contra dance weekends: in April, the Chesapeake Dance Weekend south of Annapolis (1985); in early May, Victoria's Revenge in Cape May, N.J. (1983); on Memorial Day weekend, Almost Heaven in W.Va. (1988); and in Sept., Buffalo Gap American Dance Weekend in W.Va. (1985). See [http://www.fsgw.org].
4. The Washington-Baltimore Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area (CMSA) had a population of 7.3 million in 1998, and it was the fourth largest CMSA in the United States [U.S. Census Bureau].
5. For a list of recently written history about other contra dances, see the bibliography on page 213.
6. See the chapter 9 and page 208 of the bibliography for more information.
7. Between 1985 and 1999, the Consumer Price Index increased by a factor of 1.55 [U.S. Census Bureau].
The book can be purchased for $14 from the author at [okelley@gmu.edu]. The book can also be purchased from the non-profit organization that runs the dance, i.e. The Friday Night Dancers, at [fnd@fnddancer.com] and [http://fnd.folkdancer.com].