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Bill and Bernadine Barter watched the dancers on Isle au Haut on Sunday night, like always.
Pairs of dancers swung, promenaded, clapped and sashayed in patterns to fiddle-forward music for hours in the gym at Revere Memorial Hall. The mailboat had brought most of them six miles from Stonington and stopped to pick up others from a schooner.
Dances like these were common when the Barters, now in their 80s, were growing up on the island. More than 50 years ago, they started organizing weekly dances themselves for windjammer passengers, local fishermen and year-round residents.
They remember how everyone knew the steps to the dance Lady of the Lake and the way the island’s no-nonsense postmistress could swing any grown man off his feet.
The year-round community has shrunk to about 50 people since those days, also losing young residents, a trend the town has tried for years to reverse. Friends and neighbors the Barters used to dance with are gone, and their own dances became smaller and less frequent.
But seeing young people fill the hall now is “wonderful,” the couple said.
“It’s good to see people happy, dancing,” Bernie Barter said. “It’s nice to have a dance,” her husband agreed. “You can relax, forget about everything else.”
These dances are now organized by Stonington teenager Sam Robbins, a mailboat employee who graduates from high school next weekend. He has ambitions to make them a key part of local life in Maine’s island communities again.
Robbins comes from 12 generations of Penobscot Bay residents — dance musicians and organizers among them — and learned to contra dance in Isle au Haut’s one-room schoolhouse as a child. He met the Barters through the mailboat and took on dance organizing in 2024.
Robbins sees social dancing and music as a heritage and source of connection that’s important to keep alive, and takes a simple and accessible approach that reflects area history. He’s also part of a growing dance scene in eastern Maine that participants say has a unique ability to build community.
“A lot of people, especially people who just move here, say, ‘Oh, there’s nothing for young people to do,’” Robbins said. “But if you talk to the people that have already been here, they’ll tell you different, and there’s plenty to do if you look for it. You’ve just got to find it, and I think that [dancing] really can come back strong.”
Couple’s dances, done in long lines or circles to simple fiddle tunes usually with a different partner each time, descended from the traditional dances of early settlers and were common events before television took over entertainment. As they started to disappear in the 1960s and ’70s in New England, young people revived and redeveloped them into a contra dance scene that continues in Maine and elsewhere.
Robbins started to rediscover that world as a middle schooler stuck at home during the pandemic, teaching himself to play a cigar-box banjo he built from a 1920s magazine design.
Then an aunt brought out his great-grandfather’s instruments: a guitar banjo, an accordion, a mandolin and other guitars — likely played for local dances.
The next year Robbins attended Maine Fiddle Camp, a music gathering that reintroduced him to dancing.
“It really just clicked, like, ‘Oh, this is where this music is supposed to be,” he said. “All this music is great tunes, but they’re way more fun if you play them for someone who’s going to dance than just play them in your living room.”
There, he met musician Bennett Konesni, who soon became executive director of the Bagaduce Music lending library in Blue Hill. The library expanded into group music classes, including an ensemble focused on playing tunes popular for dances in Northern New England that Robbins joined.
Konesni wants to bring back social dancing and music across Maine too. He feels the effort is at an exciting turning point.
Three new monthly dances have started locally since the pandemic, in Bangor, Brooks and Surry. All of them attract bigger, younger crowds than those he played for 10 years ago.
“I think the next generation is excited for real life experiences, not moderated by screens,” Konesni said. “And just getting out and meeting people and seeing them face to face and dancing and having a friendly, safe way to interact is really, I think, important for [them].”
Smiling attendees on Sunday shared similar feelings, and said it especially stands out in a post-pandemic world that seems more isolated, less social and increasingly divided.
Donna Harvey, a nurse originally from Corinth who’s been contra dancing since the 1970s, said the community keeps her coming back.
“It’s always fun. I can’t dance and not smile,” she said.
Kate Weed, 18, and Farris Peterson, 19, came from Portland. Both highlighted the intergenerational community that forms in one night and the connections made while dancing together, even without speaking.
Maine dancing also stands out to Konesni because it’s kept a social focus, while contra dancing elsewhere can become a subculture pursuing technical perfection. Here, he said, “perfection” means bringing people together.
That’s what he’s most proud of, and he wants to grow it.
Bagaduce Music started teaching students at a local elementary school to play music and dance this year, Konesni said, an effort that will be important to continue.
Robbins also saw an opening for simple dances that participants can enjoy without trying to master complicated moves. That’s how people traditionally danced here, with other non-contra dances like squares and polkas, and he’s also emphasized bringing local friends and year-round residents for another layer of authenticity.
“I’d love to get it back to that point, maybe in 20 or 30 years, where everyone knows the two or three dances that we do, and it’s more about who you’re dancing with than what you’re dancing,” he said.
He calls his dance a grand old time ball, not exactly a contra dance or a beginner “community dance” that some think are for children.
Robbins wants to see social dancing culture return to Deer Isle and Stonington — he’s considered starting a winter series there to bring year-round residents together, and organized one for his senior project in February — along with a weekly dance on Isle au Haut or a series spanning outer islands.
He and Konesni both see more work ahead for social dances to become culturally ubiquitous again, but feel strong progress has been made. It’s also a living, evolving tradition that can shift to keep people involved.
“People still need a little bit of time to adjust, and it just needs to be normalized,” Robbins said. “It’s just something we do. It’s not weird, it’s not a hippie thing, it’s just what we do.”
Robbins will attend Bowdoin College, where he plans to play lots of music and eventually return to Stonington.
This year’s dance dates are June 12, July 10 and Aug. 7. Tickets are $60, including the 7 p.m. mailboat trip; RSVP by texting 207-975-1053.
