Bloomington Old-Time Music and Dance Group

Dedicated to the enjoyment of music and dance, BOTMDG is a nonprofit community organization in Bloomington, Indiana. The music is mostly old-time, which means something like "fiddle tunes from Appalachia," and the dances are mostly contra-dances and a few square dances.

We sponsor:

• A dance EVERY Wednesday from 8:30pm to 10:30pm
• Dances on the fifth Saturday of the month from 8:00pm to 11:00pm
• Two special weekend dance festivals:
• Sugar Hill, held every August (in recent years at the Ransburg Boy Scout Reservation near Lake Monroe), offers hiking, swimming, camping, and lots of good food in addition to plenty of old-time music and dancing. See Dan Klarmann's web page for photos of recent Sugar Hills.
• The 30th annual Sugar Hill will be 22-24 August 2008. (The 4th weekend of August.)
• Swing-into-Spring is a smaller spring event hosted by Tom Morrison in co-operation with our group, which is held from Friday evening throuth Sunday morning on the first full week-end of April. It moved to at a NEW LOCATION in 2006.
• These "dance weekends" attract many dancers from many states, just as dance weekends in many other communities attract Bloomington dancers.

About BOTMDG

• This Month's Schedule of Dances
• Location of our regular Wednesday and 5th Saturday Dances at:
  -- Harmony School
  
• A little more about BOTMDG
• The BOTMDG Board of Coordinators
• BOTMDG Membership Form

Related Web Sites

• What is Contra-Dance?, according to Gary Shapiro. Neat introduction for those unfamiliar with this kind of dancing.
• Or read Greg Rohde's Introduction to Contradancing.
• Ted Crane's Dance Datahase allows you to search the schedule of dates, locations, callers, and bands nationwide.
• Kiran's famous Contra-dance Home Page. Links to dance communities all over the country, an index of contra dance books, and many actual contra-dances, ready to be called. All this and much much more!
• Check out the Indianapolis Traditional Music and Dance Group , website for the schedule of dances in Indy.
• For the history of Bloomington Beanery, and the text of the bean ballad, see Bean Balladeer Mark Feddersen's creation.

 

Send us email!

For more information, to let us know what you think, or just to say hello,send us email at botmdg@bloomington.in.us. For scheduling callers & bands, E-mail Bill Baus: BausXXX@alumni.indiana.edu (To deter spam "XXX" has been inserted into the preceding address. To send to that address, remove the XXX.)

Last updated 6 November 2007