Jeff KaufmanModify

2025-03-05 21:00:00

The two most common kinds of big event with contra dancing are the dance weekend and the dance camp. Putting any individual event into one category or the other can be a little tricky, but it might be helpful to consider the "classic" version of each:

Nearby I have Beantown Stomp and American Dance and Music Week at Pinewoods, as pretty typical examples.

A weirder difference, however, is that while weekends book bands, camps often advertise as if they are booking individual musicians even when they're booking bands. For example:

• American Dance & Music Week at Pinewoods lists Rodney Miller, Max Newman, Stuart Kenney, Sam Bartlett, and Mark Hellenberg (The Stringrays).

• Harmony of Song & Dance at Pinewoods lists Alex Sturbaum & Brian Lindsay (Countercurrent).

• Ashoken Northern Week lists Audrey Knuth, Max Newman, and Stuart Kenny (Lighthouse).

• Cumberland Dance Week lists Jonathan Whitall, Eric Schedler, and Meg Dedolph (The Cosmic Otters).

I admit that part of my frustration here is that I'm trying to keep track of which bands are playing which events, but isn't this also pretty confusing for prospective attendees? A major reason to book a band instead of individual musicians is that a group of people who are used to playing with each other will generally sound better, plus dancers who know they like the band's music are more likely to attend. Why be coy about this?

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2025-03-04 21:00:00

Max Newman is a great contra dance musician, probably best known for playing guitar in the Stringrays, who recently wrote a piece on dance performer pay, partly prompted by my post last week. I'd recommend reading it and the comments for a bunch of interesting discussion of the tradeoffs involved in pay.

One part that jumped out at me, though, is his third point:

3) Real World Compensation is Behind

Risking some generalizing and over-simplifying, any dance performer could tell you that over the past 10 (20!) years, the compensation numbers have been sticky, sometimes static. In real terms, compensation on the whole has not kept up with inflation.

This is quite important: if pay is decreasing in real terms then it's likely that the dance community is partly coasting off of past investment in talent and we shouldn't expect that to continue. Except when I look back over my own compensation, however, I don't see a decrease. For dance weekends, counting only weekends that included travel, my averages have been (in constant January 2025 dollars):

I wouldn't put too much weight on the low numbers for 2014 and 2015: initially the Free Raisins weren't too sure what the going rates were and probably ended up a bit on the low side.

What about dances that aren't special events? My record keeping for evening dances isn't quite good enough to make these numbers easy to pull, but I do have good data for tours:

One thing to keep in mind is that tour payments depend on where in the country you're touring, and are correlated. For example the 2024-07 tour was through a lower cost of living area (Rochester, Pittsburgh, Bloomington, St Louis, Cincinnati, Indianapolis) while the 2025-02 tour was the opposite (Baltimore, DC, Bethlehem, NYC). But here as well I don't see payment failing to keep up with inflation.

One more place I can look for data is what BIDA has been paying. The structure is a guarantee (the minimum performers are paid, regardless of what attendees do) and then a potential bonus (originally a share of profits, switching to an attendance bonus in 2023). Here's what I see, but keep in mind that these averages exclude some dances where there's missing data:

Note again that all the dollar amounts in this post are (inflation-adjusted) January 2025 dollars.

This data isn't ideal, though, because it's telling the story of a dance that has been becoming increasingly popular over time. While I do think there's a component of higher pay leading to being able to attract better performers, leading to higher attendance, leading to higher pay, etc, the pay increases have mostly been responsive: realizing that things are going well and we're able to pay musicians more. [1]

I think what would be most illuminating here would be for performers to share their numbers: how have you seen things change over time?

[1] I was curious how much of the increased attendance has been switching to booking some established bands, but most of the increase predates that booking change.

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2025-03-03 21:00:00

Our oldest is finishing up 5th grade, at the only school in our city that doesn't continue past 5th. The 39 5th graders will be split up among six schools, and we recently went though the process of indicating our preferences and seeing where we ended up. The process isn't terrible, but it could be modified to stop giving an advantage to parents who carefully game it out while better matching kids to preferred schools.

First, what is the current process? You put in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice rankings, which are interpreted in three rounds. Kids are assigned to 1st choice schools, then the ones who didn't get in are assigned among 2nd choices, and finally 3rd choices. Ties are broken by sibling priority, proximity priority, and then by lottery number.

For sibling priority, if you have a sibling who will be in the school next year you have priority over students who don't. In practice this means if you list a sibling priority school as your first choice you get it.

For proximity priority, each family has a proximity school. This may not be the closest one to their house, and for us it isn't, but its at least reasonably close. It's the same as siblings: you have priority over any non-proximity students. Listing your proximity school first won't always get you in, since some schools (ex: ours) have many more proximity students than open spots.

The open spots this year are:

Under the current system, what did it make sense for us to put for our top three choices? Ignoring B, which has no available spots, our preference order is D > E > A > C > F. We could put that down directly (D, E, A) but how do proximity and limited spaces affect our decision?

Our proximity school is E, with 4 available seats. It was very likely that the family with sibling priority would put it first, so really 3 available seats. If we put it first and so did all other families with proximity, we'd have a 3/15 chance of getting a spot there. I think this means our best chances would be putting first D, then C, and then it doesn't matter much:

• While we have proximity at E, since there are so many more E-proximal students than spots, even if it was our top choice I'd only put it first if we thought "E vs everything else" was the key question. But since we prefer D, and since I expect enough proximity students will put E first that it will go in the first round, we shouldn't list it at all: that would waste our 2nd or 3rd pick.

• Similarly, I expect A to go entirely to students with proximity, so no point listing it.

• Putting our 1st choice on D makes sense to me: it's our actual first choice, and even after accounting for sibling and proximity students it still has ten open spots.

• Then we should put C next, since we prefer it to F.

For simplicity, lets assume everyone has the same preferences we would have if we lived where they did. That means people prefer whichever is closest of A, E, or D. Then on the first round, of the 39 rising 6th graders:

• Two or three list A with priority, two get it and zero or one miss out
• Zero list B
• Zero list C
• Thirteen list D with priority, and fifteen to twenty, including us, list without priority
• Four to ~eight list E with priority, four get it, and zero to four miss out.
• Zero list F

So our odds of getting D would be somewhere between 10/20 and 10/15.

But the real world looks a bit better than this:

• Some kids are probably moving out of district, though they may wait until after they know their school assignment to decide.

• Not every family has the same preferences.

• Some families don't game this out carefully. I especially think it's likely that too many families who are close to indifferent between D and E put E first on the basis of it being their proximity school.

When we put in our preferences I guessed our likely outcomes were 62% D, 35% C, 2% other. Several weeks later we learned that our lottery number was 19/39, we got C and were placed first on the waitlist for D. Since there are ~70 rising sixth graders for D I think it's very likely that at least one of them will move away and we'll get in.

This felt a bit like playing a board game because that's the main place I work through rules in a zero-sum context, but here the results matter. I really don't like that us getting a school we prefer essentially has to come at the expense of other families getting what they'd prefer.

While the zero-sum nature is unavoidable, we could at least rework the system to no longer require families to be strategic. This is actually a very well-known problem, and we can apply the Gale–Shapley algorithm, which is used in medical residency matching:

Instead of listing just your top three choices, you list all of them. Because there's no benefit to misreporting your preferences this is relatively easy. Once you have everyone's preferences you assign lottery numbers as before, and then run multiple rounds of an algorithm.

In the first round, every student "applies" to their top choice. The school ranks students by sibling status, then proximity status, then lottery number, and provisionally accepts students up to capacity. In the next round unassigned students "apply" to their next ranked schools, with schools provisionally accepting anyone they rank higher than their previously provisionally accepted students and bumping students as needed. This continues until everyone has a place, and which point provisional acceptances become real acceptances and students are notified.

I especially like that with this algorithm families don't need to consider what other families are likely to do. If they prefer E to D, they can just put E first, without worrying that they are wasting a choice. While as someone who does think through strategy I expect this change would make our family mildly worse off, a system where people have the best chances of getting into their preferred schools if they accurately report their preferences seems clearly better overall.

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2025-03-02 21:00:00

I realized I've been eating oranges wrong for years. I cut them into slices and eat them slice by slice. Which is fine, except that I'm wasting the zest. Zest is tasty, versatile, compact, and freezes well. So now, whenever I eat a navel orange I wash and zest it first:

The zest goes in a small container in the freezer, and is available for cooking and baking as needed. Probably my favorite thing to do with it right now is steep it in cream (~3-15g per cup, bring to near boil, leave for 20min, filter) and then use the cream for all sorts of things (truffles, pastry cream, etc). I've been meaning to try a cold infusion (24hr in the fridge) which ought to be a bit more true to the fruit.

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2025-03-01 21:00:00

For a while ( 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2023, 2024) I've been counting how often various contra bands and callers are being booked for larger [1] events. Initially, I would run some scripts, typically starting from scratch each time because I didn't remember what I did last time, but after extending TryContra to support events listings, I automated this process. This also means we can have a real-time version, listing not what happened over the past year but all the announced gigs: trycontra.com/gigstats.

(This looks partly unsorted because I break ties randomly on each pageload, and right now there are a lot of bands in the system with four bookings.)

Organizers have told me they've used these lists to identify performers to consider booking for their events, and annual updates meant long lags. For example, an organizer looking at the 2024 list now might be seeing a booking that was agreed on two years ago! This lag probably exacerbated not-great dynamics around organizers booking already-popular performers, and I'm glad to be able to give people a fresher list to work with.

The list is, of course, not complete: there are bookings that haven't been announced yet, and there are typically website updates that haven't made their way into the spreadsheet yet. If you have bookings I'm missing, please let me know by commenting on the sheet!

[1] My goal is to include contra performers from all events that have at least 9hr of contra.

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2025-02-28 21:00:00

The world would be better with a lot more transparency about pay, but we have a combination of taboos and incentives where it usually stays secret. Several years ago I shared the range of what dance weekends ended up paying me, and it's been long enough to do it again.

This is all my dance weekend gigs since restarting, both with Free Raisins and Kingfisher, and all either included travel or were within a few hours drive. They also all included housing and food. Some involved more playing than others and each gig has its own combination of pros and cons, but here's the range:

• $600
• $650
• $650
• $750
• $800
• $800
• $900
• $900
• $900
• $900
• $950

I have at times had performers try to convince me that I should push broadly for higher pay [1] but I'm not pushing either way here: my goal is to talk about what I've generally been paid so performers and organizers can negotiate with more of an understanding of what's typical. I'd be supportive of others sharing what they pay

(Overall see both sides in here, and have been on both sides. On balance, however, I'm a bit more sympathetic towards organizers, who are volunteering their time to balance a bunch of competing priorities, putting on financially accessible events that risk not breaking even.)

[1] This may be illegal, as a kind of price fixing, I'm not sure. The 2025-01-14 FTC policy statement looks relevant, but, since that went out right at the end of Biden's term, who knows.

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