Welcome to the Dance Gypsy’s Dance and Festival Finder

[Note: to get rid of this (or any other) help window, click on the window or click again on the question mark.]

Use this tool to find any of over 500 folk, contra and traditional dance events each month. Search for dances according to your own individual needs — by any combination of date, location, distance from home, dance style or series name. If you wish, the form will even keep track of your dance choices for next time you visit.

The simplest search: You must specify at least two criteria: regular dance/special events and one of the 4 other categorizations (if you specify no options at all) the search would find thousands of events. Fortunately, simple selections would find all dances within the next week (typically 1-200 events).

Time Constraints: Select the time frame you are interested in. If not selected, events will be found for the next year. If selected, the default is the next week, but you may select any date range you like (even in past).

Quicksearch will open a calendar from which you can select a single day’s events: select the “Quicksearch” button and then the day you want.

Distance Constraints: Select a location. All events within the specified distance of the location can be found. If not selected, events will be found anywhere in the world.

Style Constraints: Select the dance style or styles you are interested in. All events featuring those styles (and only those styles) will be selected. If not selected all dance styles will be found.

Advanced Constraints: This enables some special searches, including search by events name, arbitrary keyword and/or specific states.

You may select dances using any combination of the above choices dates, locations, distances from home, dance styles and event names.

The “suppress maps” option is useful if you expect a large number of events and/or if you have a slow Internet connection. The maps are at least 4 times as large at the textual results, so it does make a big difference.

Save choices: Any time you make a search with this option checked, the selected criteria become your default. Next time you visit the dance gypsy event finder, those choices will automatically be selected. Do note that date values are not selected automatically. If your default search includes dates, future search will select on dates but the default will be one week following the time of request.

General guidelines:

• Perhaps the most useful restriction is the — search by distance — option. Just specify a distance and any US or Canadian  town and state/province, US zip code or Canadian Canadian postal code — the finder will locate any dances or festivals within the given radius of the target town.
• You can further restrict the search by specifying only certain dance styles. The advanced search allows you to specify specific towns, states, regions, festivals or keywords: the search will find only those events matching the added details.
• For text specifications you may specify as many words as you wish, but only those events satisfying all words in your list will be found.
• You may specify partial names, in which case the requested words are assumed to be the leading letters of the names or words you are seeking.
• Thus, for example, all of the following will find a dance in New London:
  • New London
  • London
  • New
  • N Lon
  • N L
  • new london (it doesn't care about case)
• but it will not find misspelled names or near misses, thus
  • "Gnu london" will not work,
• In general you will do better to under-specify rather than over-specify. For example, even a popular specification like:
  • Camb
  • Eastern Mass
  • August 1 to Aug 31
• will find only about 10-20 dances — but they will probably all be relevant. On the other hand:
• “Cambrige” will find none, nor will “Cambridge”, “Western Mass”.
• If you select “remember my selections”, then once you make a search, your preferences (except for the dates, since they will certainly change) will be remembered for future searches (unless you have cookies disabled).
• You may tell it to forget your choices at any time.