About Our Dances

Dance Video Archives

The Dance Video Archives, sponsored by Childgrove, has hundreds of videos of these dances! After you read this page, you can go there and enjoy seeing what each of the forms looks like. 

Recent News Article Featuring Childgrove

Here's a link to an article on Childgrove's English dances from the South County Times in July of 2017.  Enjoy!

Here's a link to a TV show about Childgrove Contra Dance from HECTV in September of 2017.

Read More

Read more here about our bands...  ...our callers...  ...and our choreographers...

We offer three different types of evenings - Try Each of them!

What can you expect at our dances?

At our dances, you will:

  1. Feel at ease because all our dances include lessons, are designed to be friendly to new dancers, and welcome dancers of all skill levels.
  2. Meet helpful partners who enjoy dancing with new dancers, who will help you learn the steps easily, and who change partners after every dance
  3. Enjoy quality live music and trained callers and dance leaders.
  4. Recognize many of the same people you meet at any of our dances, people who are here to have fun and are glad to see you return.

What Kind of Music will you Dance to?

St Louis is lucky to have many fine musicians who enjoy playing for our dances, so you will dance to live music at all of our regular dances. We do dance to recorded music at our pre-dance workshops and at the first Monday English workshop, though occasionally they, too, will have live musicians.

At our contra dances, the music is generally old-time traditional Missouri fiddle music, played, typically, by a fiddle, banjo, mandolin and guitar.  The Callers Choice dances often feature wider variety of regional styles, including New England, Irish, French Canadian as well as old-time string bands. The English dances have music that will remind you of classical music from the Renaissance and Baroque eras, even though some of the tunes are modern. The Waltz party band usually has a fiddle or two, a flute and/or a clarinet, a keyboard, and occasionally a bass, and plays music from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or modern tunes that sound as if they were written then.