As Brooklyn Contra closed out 2022 with our first New Year’s Eve dance in three years, we saw how the ways the pandemic forced us to slow down and adapt also created room for us to grow as an organization. We are excited to share a bit about our journey so far, and look forward to collaborating with you to create a more participatory, joyful NYC through dance in the future.
We have emerged from the lockdown era with higher dance attendance, a cohesive and stable (if sadly smaller) organizing team, and a refreshed vision. Two years without dancing and another of tentative re-entry allowed us to take a step back from the frenzy of event organizing. With that time we instead reflected on the “why” of our contra dance organizing work, our ambitions for the organization, and what it would take to get there.
From conversations during park jams, zoom meetings and rooftop waltzes came a desire to build a broader organization that more directly serves, our vision of “a city where culture is participatory, created by the people who experience it, working with traditions and evolving them across and between generations.” We knew we weren’t going back to being a once- or twice-a-month dance-only organization, but rather would move forward to become an organization that nourishes the roots of contra dancing culture; evolves with our values and the times; welcomes new audiences; and works with similar traditions beyond the contra dancing world to create a flourishing ecosystem of participatory culture.
