Address
ContraCollege2010
c/o Joyce Fortune
133 Ortega Avenue
Mountain View, CA 94040
Phone Number
650 704 2647
Email
ContraCollege2010@bacds.org
Sponsored By
Bay Area Country Dance Society
In Collaboration With
North Bay Country Dance Society
Traditional Dancers of the Golden State
Traditional Dancers of Santa Cruz
By profession Susan Petrick is a cognitive psychologist who does software usability research for Intuit in Reno, Nevada and in the Bay area. In contra dance circles, she is a local treasure rapidly gaining national prominence who has been calling contra dances for ten years. Her greatest pleasure is to program interesting, varied dances with great flow, and to teach them clearly and concisely. She has enjoyed working with wonderful bands, traveling and calling throughout the country in addition to up and down the West Coast.
Susan was invited to join the staff of Contra College because of her exceptionally clear teaching, expert pacing, and gracious manner. Her efficient guidance makes even complex dances accessible to all. She has embraced the possibility of spending a weekend working with new and intermediate dancers, since she enjoys so much the process of helping others learn dance and the fun of watching dancers internalize new forms and express themselves. Susan also regularly leads popular workshops on waltz and hambo.
Joyce Fortune is a Spanish teacher at a local Bay Area high school. She has been dancing for over five years, mostly contra dance, with some occasional English country dancing. She is a regular attendee at Balance the Bay, Contra Carnivale and dance weekends at Monte Toyon. She has become proficient in both gender roles and enjoys working with newcomers and building the contra dance community. Recently, she has become the main organizer at Palo Alto Contra Dance. She is extremely well-organized, analytical and systematic. She is also friendly and committed to creating great dances that are welcoming to all. She is visually-impaired and knits constantly.
Joyce was frustrated when first learning to do Contra dance by the lack of explicit teaching. As a systematic and analytical thinker, she was hoping for more explanation from workshop leaders at weekend dances. She muddled through and learned to dance, but recently decided that she would try to create for others the kind of experience that she wanted when she was new.
Eric Anderson loves to play piano and sometimes fiddle for contra dances up and down the coast and across the country. He lives and dies for the whoops and hollers, and he really knows how to make the dancers balance and swing. His main Contra dance bands at this time are the Fiddlerats and Bandemonium! (see below). Along with being an accomplished musician, he is well-known throughout the local and West Coast music scene and is the person responsible for putting together the musical combos for the Contra College weekend. He will also be collaborating with Susan Petrick to teach the Friday night introduction to hearing and dancing to Contra Music.
Lee Anne grew up in Saratoga, California and earned her B.A. in Music from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1977. For several years she was a member of the Santa Cruz Symphony and the Carmel Valley Opera Orchestra. Since 1979 she has focused her energy on traditional Celtic and American folk music. Her bluegrass band Sidesaddle & Co. has performed at numerous festivals and recorded several albums. She and Eric Anderson make up the group Bandemonium! (see below). She enjoys playing for contra dances so much that she plays in two other bands: the popular Bay Area band Luceo and Sorcerer's Apprentice, a band she started in order to teach her fiddle students how to play for contra dances.
Bandemonium! is a high-energy dance band from the San Francisco Bay Area combining the fancy and fetching bluegrass fiddling of Lee Anne Welch with the contra dance piano drive of Eric Anderson, for a combination of jigs and reels, hoedowns, waltzes and polkas that will keep your feet moving. They play French Canadian jigs, Irish reels, Scottish dance melodies, Kenny Baker bluegrass tunes, and everything in between. Listen to a brief excerpt from their recent set at Seattle's Emerald City Contradance.