PORT ANGELES — There are no special criteria to meet when going to a community contra dance.
You don’t have to bring a partner, though you can come with a bunch of friends. Your feet needn’t know any steps other than walking through the door.
Dress is casual — but you might want to wear something appropriate for exercise, the dance caller advises.
This caller is Joe Micheals, he of the silken voice and decades of experience.
Micheals, along with the band Powerhouse featuring fiddler Kate Powers, will host the first contra dance of 2016 at the Black Diamond Community Hall, 1942 Black Diamond Road, this Saturday night.
The evening starts at 7:30 p.m. with a workshop and refresher, during which Micheals will welcome everybody: beginners to experienced dancers, children, teens and grown-ups.
Once the workshop’s done, Powerhouse will play from 8 p.m. until around 11 p.m.
Admission is a suggested $8 donation for adults and $4 for youngsters 17 and younger — or dancers can bring finger foods to share during the break.
Contra, a line-and-circle dance that developed in New England, is a great way to meet people, said the Seattle-based caller, who’s been at this since 1964.
“You can just go by yourself and have a great time . . . and dance with people you’d never meet any other way,” Micheals said, adding that the community hall is a place where everybody, regardless of politics, religion and other differences, can enjoy one another.
Dishing out the music for it all are Kate and her older brother, guitarist Ethan Powers; fellow guitar man Don Betts, upright bassist Kristina Gustafson and bodhran player Bill Woods.
“We have an awesome fiddler,” Woods said of Kate, who is a few weeks shy of her 16th birthday.
She is all about versatility. Besides leading Powerhouse, which has been together about three years, Kate plays violin in the Port Angeles Symphony — stretching out lately in works by Mozart, Grieg and Tchaikovsky — and she composes fiddle music of her own.
Saturday night’s dance will feature a couple of her originals, “In the Mode” and “Reflections of Tradition,” plus some Rodney Miller tunes such as “Tongadale” and “Up Downey.”
At the same time, a contra dance is a chance to play more “spur-of-the-moment music,” said Kate. The dancers aren’t scrutinizing every note. So you can do some improvising, provided you keep a strong beat.
The musicians stay engaged in a give-and-take with the dancers, however; “you want to get the tempo from them,” the fiddler added.
As for this style of dancing, “it’s really easy. Even I can do it.”
Micheals, for his part, looks forward to Saturday night because, as he likes to say, people here “bring it.”
“I’ve called all over the Northwest, and Port Angeles has such great energy . . . they hoot and they holler and they have a great time.
“You don’t take that for granted,” he said.
“There’s something about joining hands in a circle,” with people you know and don’t know, and just having fun together.
“It’s a high.”
For information about this and future community contra dances, held on the first Saturday of the month and occasionally on other nights at the Black Diamond hall, phone 360-457-5667 and see www.blackdiamonddance.org.
