Burning Man had been a "bucket list" item for Sam and me for many years, so when the opportunity to be the featured called for the 2018 Burning Man Contradance Camp presented itself, we jumped! We scrambled to find an RV rental, get educated about Burning Man, and get additional essentials for the adventure. It was an amazing experience! The organization and effort of the well-established Contradance Camp was really superb. We had a contra dance each night Monday-Friday from 8-10pm, with live music on a real dance floor. Countercurrent (Brian Lindsay, Alex Sturbaum, Ness Smith-Savedoff) provided great tunes. Chris, Butch, and Spider sat in with them some nights. I pulled lots of easy dances ahead of time, even lots of mixers, not knowing for sure how many newcomers we'd get. I was told to expect people jumping in at all times, sometimes in various states of awareness. But we had a great crop of experienced dancers to help and I wound up calling only contras. Eric Black called a couple of dances most nights, and Russell Frank called as well. This year, at my initiative, we used gender free terms -- Larks & Ravens -- all the time. It was easy to explain, seemed to present no additional challenges, got several nice comments from a few of the dancers. Here, in alphabetical order, are most of the dances I called during the week. A few repeats, but enough variety to keep the experienced dancers happy.
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