Flurry Festival


The Flurry Festival is an annual weekend festival held in February in Saratoga Springs, New York. The festival includes one of the largest contra dances in the U.S., as well as other types of traditional folk dance and music, and draws over 5000 attendees and 400 performers every year. It was first held in 1988 and is run by the nonprofit DanceFlurry Organization.

History

The festival was first held in 1988.

Programming

The festival includes a wide variety of traditional folk dance and music, as well as impromptu musical jam sessions, discussions, and craft sales. In recent years, it has featured more than 250 different sessions per year from Friday through Sunday of Presidents' Day weekend. The festival is best known for its large contra dances, which can feature up to approximately 500 dancers dancing simultaneously on a custom-built dance floor in a hotel ballroom. Other dance offerings include swing, Latin, English country, square, clogging, hip-hop, cajun, zydeco, Irish, Scandinavian, Middle Eastern, Asian, and yoga. The festival caters to all skill levels.