One Friday a month, in the Conservatory orchestra rehearsal room or Wilder Main, men and women trade their Levis for audaciously patterned gypsy skirts and prance barefoot to the sounds of the Black River Ironworks, Oberlin’s newest contra dance band.

Made up of College senior Corey Walters on flute, College sophomore Jonah Sidman on fiddle, double degree senior Michael Berkowitz on guitar and Conservatory sophomore Elyse Underhill on piano and accordion, the band has enjoyed a steady stream of gigs in Ohio and as far away as Michigan.

After playing a dance or two “by accident,” some version of the band, at the time without the evocative name, went on what Walters describes as a tour “down the mid-Atlantic part of the East Coast.”

“[Last summer] we got to thinking, ‘we got hired at one place. Why don’t we just see if we can…play these places, too?’  And surprisingly a lot of [people agreed] having never heard us [play] before,” said Walters.

Regular contra dances are usually surrounded by a strong and loyal community made up of dancers, callers, musicians and bake sale organizers. It’s not unusual in some areas to see an entire family at a dance together.

This focus on community extends to how dances hire live musicians, which is how BRI had such luck. It makes the series of gigs the group booked through e-mail all the more amazing. A lot of dances are impressed with new blood.

Contra “is not exactly part of the popular culture,” said Sidman. “For the most part [dance organizers] are very eager to have new and young people play.”

At most of the dances they play these days, the musicians of BRI encounter a mix of ages, but it depends on location — in a college town, said Underhill, you’re obviously going to see a lot more college-age dancers. In lots of cities, home-schooling communities have also gotten involved with contra or other types of folk dancing.

Is contra dancing hip now? It’s a possibility, according to Walters.  

“Hip” may mean that more young, classically trained musicians are gravitating toward traditional music, and becoming quite successful. In the world of folk festivals, this is definitely a trend — neo-traditional bands like Crooked Still, which boasts the first string player admitted to the Berklee College of Music on a full scholarship, headline festivals in upstate New York and clubs in New York City.

Some folk musicians take a stab at it from the classical side of things as well. Béla Fleck’s 2001 album Perpetual Motion, on which he collaborated with such mainstream classical giants as double bassist Edgar Meyer and violinist Joshua Bell, was a quiet reminder that he wasn’t just a good “banjo picker,” but a “virtuoso.”

Although Walters is not a Conservatory student, he has had some classical flute training. Sidman agreed that classically trained musicians turning to folk music is not a new trend.

At the same time, said Underhill, who is a music composition major and also plays classical piano, it’s not necessarily popular to play traditional music as a classical musician.

“It’s not something people at the Con would encourage,” she said.   

Another issue, she noted, is the “different energy” it takes to play in either tradition. Walters put in that many traditional music communities frown on markers of classical training.

“When I started going to [traditional music] sessions in Baltimore, I only had my classical silver flute,” he said, “and people really looked down on that...[People say] you should either play classical or traditional, because switching back and forth leads to a lot of complications in the method.”  

Whatever those complications, the BRI are not the only musicians to straddle the crossover line. “One of the fiddlers we’re bringing to the Dandelion Romp actually teaches violin at the New England Conservatory,” says Walters. “You can really hear [the classical training] in her playing.”

At Oberlin, the Conservatory may overpower the traditional music scene, even while contra dancers frolic among the kettledrums once a month, but events like the upcoming Dandelion Romp dance weekend make room for contra dancing at Oberlin to form a sustained, larger community.

The student dancers and players may be just passing through, but “[other] people know about Oberlin,” said Underhill. “At the dances we play in Columbus or Cleveland, there are always people who have been to Oberlin dances.”

Ironworks will continue gigging, next traveling to Lansing, Michigan.