A New Calling: Learning to Lead Community Dances

The power of community gatherings, and especially the joy and magic that comes from the gatherings that focus on music and dance, have been covered fairly extensively in our other blog posts.

As participants in our community dances may know, it’s easy to be swept up in the movement and partnership of the dance and forget that there’s a delicate art (and a rich history) to the unsung conductor of such ceremonies: the caller. 

The caller, armed with nothing more than a head mic and an air of gravitas, is responsible for communicating with the band (an array of plucky fiddles, banjos, guitars, mandolins, and in our school’s case, the occasional bass saxophone) and capturing the attention of barn-dizzy hooligans (a group of enthusiasts with wild hair flyaways and sweaty palms who are often completely uninitiated to terms like “promenade” and “allemande” (not to mention phrases like “swing your partner!” or “seesaw and balance!”).

The caller takes this endearing chaos and turns it into (mostly) ordered dances; in pairs, groups of eight, spiraling circles, or long, stretched wide rows where dancers come together in and out and round and round, laughing and tumbling in step with the old time musical accompaniment. 

How does one get into this type of facilitation?

Well, for the three of us from Ely who attended the Call of the Loon Community Arts sponsored “Iron Range Barn Dances Calling Workshop” at the end of April, it starts with an enthusiasm for dance and music.

Molly Roske, who teaches at Minnesota North’s College at the Vermillion Campus and can be seen at the Ely Folk School’s dances with her baby daughter Sylvie on her hip and her husband Tim on her arm, was first initiated into the world of dance while attending grad school in New Haven. While attending her program, she learned about intermittent, “underground, mostly word-of-mouth” gatherings at a professor’s barn where students, teachers, and community members of all ages would gather for a night of fun, and extremely crowded, contra dancing. Between the flying elbows and the late night hooting and hollering, Molly became hooked.

Everywhere she moved from then on out, she would seek out the contra community in her new town. She met Terrence Smith (of the Tamarack Dance Association in Duluth) when he called for the Ely Folk School dances and hired him to call for her wedding. When Terrence shared a flier at an EFS dance about a calling workshop, she rallied some friends at the opportunity and learned the basics. Her experience with clawhammer banjo has helped her wrap her head around working with the band, and she’s since called for dances at the Voyageur Outward Bound School and YMCA Camp Widjiwagan.

In April’s workshop she was able to hone and repeat some of her skills, focusing on developing her “endings” and how to keep dances repetitive and understandable while still staying fresh and exciting (planning out the different “formations” based on your crowd’s experience and demographics is a crucial part of a successful dance.)

Emily Roose, local councilwoman and hostess extraordinaire, was also in attendance at this workshop and is likewise an avid Ely Folk School Community Dance attendee. An enthusiastic volunteer often tasked with hanging up the dangling strings of fairy lights pre-dance and helping greet newcomers, Emily has always appreciated the warmth and laughter that comes from our gatherings.

Her first forays into music were because of her mom; a trained pianist who made sure her daughter grew up in a kinder-music program. Emily first tried the stand-up bass in 4th grade (bassists got the honor of wearing thematically appropriate hats during elementary performances, an obvious draw to young Emily’s costume-based enthusiasm) and by practicing and playing often and well enough, she eventually became the principal bassist in the Gustavus Symphony Orchestra at her college. At Gustavus, Emily also took a social dance class (her first taste of swing!).

She took a break from music and dance until she moved to Ely when she started playing to support the local community musicals, joined the local swing class, and got involved with the Northern Lights Association’s “Dancing with the Ely Stars” event. At her first Ely Folk School dance, Emily knew she had to get more involved. 

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At the calling workshop, Molly, Emily, and I learned about the history of community dance. In the Southern USA community dances were organized in the sprawling living rooms of plantations and so the style that emerged there was called “square dancing” which utilizes eight people (four sets of two) arranged facing each other in a square. These dances are often silly, self-contained, and more rigid on numbers as compared to dance styles like “contra” which developed in the New England region of the USA and gathered participants in large, long work halls after-hours. The narrow halls encouraged a dance style with two long lines of dancers facing each other, with a focus on formations that were more space efficient and that brought dancers together and apart.

Molly’s experience with contra dancing and Emily’s background in music helped them both make sense of the different instructions to give the band, and the different types of accompaniments for square and contra dances. Tunes can be square, rectangular, or crooked based on the beats, measures, and the rigidity of instruction. Some dances are jigs, some are reels. A caller’s responsibility is not just to their dancers, but also to their musicians.  A good caller has to lead in the band, adjust for the pace, and time out instruction and endings so that dancers can mix and transfer skills, and leave all feeling accomplished and satisfied when giving the signal for the music to come to an end.

The workshop’s mixture of oral history and experiential learning gave the three of us plenty of context to get started, and we all shared the opportunity to participate both as dancer and caller. We supported each other in fumbling through instructing as a caller, waving hand signals at a very patient band and shouting awkwardly to our (thankfully very capable) fellow-dancers. As the time passed we each scribbled more notes and gained more confidence, pointing out ways to improve to each other and giddily planning ways we could share the facilitation load at future community dances. “If each of us calls one to three songs, we could easily do this for a two-hour dance,” remarked Emily as she finished up directing us.

All of us share an enthusiasm for dance of course, but also an understanding for the importance of keeping the community dance tradition alive in the Iron Range. As a cultural phenomenon, we understand that dance is a way to bring people of different ages together. It’s a way to spark laughter and fun, and a way for newcomers and neighbors alike to know each other better. It’s a way to keep history alive! To share the same formations that generations and generations, on different ends of our countries, have learned and practiced and danced with each other. It’s a way to lead, to show up for our town and make connections and culture happen. And it’s a way to ensure that music and dance stays a part of our lives for a long time yet to come. 

We're very excited to have Molly Roske be our caller for our September 2026 Community Barn Dance on Saturday, September 12th, 7-9:30pm at Ethel's Acres (2231 Robich Rd).

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We typically host community dances four times a year: March, June, September and November. Depending on the time of year, we host these dances at Ethel’s Acres (for a true barn dance experience!) or at the Ely Community Center.

You can read more about our dances and other community events here and view our upcoming community events schedule here.

Photo from our June 2026 Community Barn Dance by Andy Vogl of AV Photography.