High Tea and Whiskey Caller and Band 2011

Susan Kevra

Susan Kevra lives in Nashville, Tennessee, teaches dance and plays music on both coasts and both sides of the Atlantic. She began calling and teaching traditional dances in 1991, appearing in New England grange halls in tiny, snow-covered villages as well as major festivals and dance camps throughout America. She spent 2000 - 2001 in France and traveling throughout Western Europe teaching contras, squares and English Country Dancing – and learning French dances.

Susan is noted for her charm, wit and respect for the traditions she shares. Dancers on both sides of the Atlantic appreciate her clear teaching and diverse repertoire of singing squares, Western patter calls, contras and English Country dances. She has choreographed a number of well loved contra and square dances and is the author of "Trip to Phan Reel" and "The Country of Marriage."

A fine clarinetist and singer, Susan is also a member of the English Country Dance Band, "Meeting House." Susan teaches French and American Studies at Vanderbilt University, where one of her most popular courses is, "American Social History through Dance."

Miranda and the Ragged Robins:
Amanda Arana, Martha Edwards and Billy Boyer

MARTHA EDWARDS , fiddler, started playing the violin when she was 8 and continued through college, graduate school and for twenty years as a free-lance musician in Boston, MA. She holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the Oberlin Conservatory, and a Master’s degree from the New England Conservatory. She now plays exclusively for dancing – contra, morris, English Country Dancing and nineteenth-century couples dancing. She is a member of Stringdancer (which has played throughout much of the Southeast and Midwest), the Tu'Penny Uprights (English band for the performance troupe Dance Discovery), Reel Women and the Jigelos (with Kristin Graham), Playford's PaJaMa (with Pam Carson Stoll and Jane Knoeck), The Rolling Scones (with Pam Carson Stoll and Kendall Rogers), Summer Lightening (with Jill Allen), the Halcyon Light Orchestra (which plays for Waltzes and other nineteenth-centure couples dances) , Chicory (with Ben Schreiber and Michael Shapiro), and Ragged Robin (with Ben Schreiber and Billy Boyer).

BILLY BOYER, keyboard player, graduated in 2009 from St Louis University, and has been molding young musical minds at Notre Dame de La Salette Boys School in Georgetown, IL, ever since. He comes from a dancing and musical family and, with his father Larry Boyer, founded the St Louis Youth Contra, aimed at bringing young people of high school and college age into traditional dance. He is a spirited and inventive keyboard player who plays with great good humor and passion.

MIRANDA ARANA, flautist, grew up in western New York, and began playing the flute in her early teens. After receiving classical training at Eastman School of Music, she went on to discover her passion for improvisation and world music. She spent her twenties traveling, working and living in Southeast Asia, always with her trusty flute in tow.   After studying traditional Vietnamese flute playing with master artists while living and working with Vietnamese refugees in the Philippines, and during a two-year stay in Hanoi in the early 1990s, she became a member of the Phong Nguyen Ensemble, one of the premier traditional Vietnamese ensembles in the United States. She received a master's degree in Ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University in 1996, and she has happily "settled down" in Norman, Oklahoma, where she currently teaches world music at the University of Oklahoma and plays with the wonderful contra dance band Ladies at Play. She also plays with Alma Latina, a folkloric Latin American ensemble; Nur, Oklahoma's premier Middle Eastern ensemble, and Banish Misfortune, one of Oklahoma's longest-lived Celtic music ensembles, and Arabesque, which gives her the opportunity to integrate her interests in various music traditions.