Teaching Staff Bios
Joanna Reiner Wilkinson
Joanna Reiner Wilkinson has taught English dance for over two decades. In addition to being one of the leaders of the Philadelphia-based Germantown Country Dancers, her calling has taken her from Amherst to Ann Arbor, from NEFFA to Hey Days, from St. Croix to Vancouver, and other points abroad, including many sessions for the Country Dance & Song Society (CDSS) and CDS Boston Centre at Pinewoods Camp. While known for her clear calling and instruction, Joanna loves teaching workshops for ECD callers, and workshops that explore ECD technique, new dances, and how people learn and remember dance choreography.
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Bruce Hamilton
Bruce Hamilton is a well-respected, thoughtful, and energetic teacher of English and Scottish dancing with 45 years’ experience. He has launched dance classes, trained teachers, coached performing groups, and adjudicated festivals.
A retired research scientist, Bruce is always looking for new ways to understand and present ideas for the dancer. Whenever he presents workshops, he weaves many conceptual threads besides dance technique and choreography into his lessons. Musicality, sociability, and physiology are his current favorites. People often say they come away with a different way to experience and think about dance. Occasionally he holds a weekend teachers’ class that also draws high praise. He continues to run a bi-weekly English dance class in the Bay Area. In the recent past, he was the president of the Country Dance and Song Society. With invitations to teach at many festivals and dance camps each year, he has taught workshops all around the United States and in the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, and Australia.
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Lindsey Dono
Washington-based caller Lindsey Dono fell in love with ECD at Northwest New Year’s Camp and has immersed deeply in the genre ever since. A mainstay on the contra circuit, Lindsey has been on staff at camps, weeks, and festivals for over a decade, extending to call English at Youth Dance Weekend, Lady of the Lake, and other events across the west coast. Known for precise teaching and welcoming stage presence, Lindsey crafts programs with rich narrative arcs. Both on stage and off, Lindsey is committed to building inclusive, intergenerational folk communities.
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Music/Sound Staff Bios
Alicia Cover
Alicia Cover is excited for their third year at Fall Frolick! Alicia is a dancer, fiddler, sound person, and community organizer. As a classically trained violinist with an ear for music theory, she loves balancing harmonies and timbres in a dance hall. Alicia has run sound systems for Fall Frolick, Mad Robin Ball, Circle Left contra dance, Improper English, and various BACDS contra and English dances in the East Bay. In her spare time she knits, explores bookstores in Oakland, and takes care of her many houseplants.
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Audrey Jaber
You know Audrey Leigh Jaber (Knuth) is performing if the room is buzzing at a higher level. Her fiddling, featured in bands including The Free Raisins, The Gaslight Tinkers, Audacious (with Larry Unger), and Wake Up Robin, has electrified dance and concert halls across the US and Europe. Hailing from Honolulu and now living in California, she cut her folk teeth in the Boston area, attending Berklee College of Music and spending years exploring the thriving New England folk scene. Audrey’s fiddle playing is rhythmically lively and spontaneous; she's guaranteed to get you up and dancing. She specializes in English dance, New England, Celtic, and Old Time tunes (and did we mention she’s also an audio engineer?!). You might also have taken a workshop with Audrey, as she’s been on staff at various camps including various weeks at Pinewoods, Ashokan Northern Week, BACDS American week, New London Assembly and Halsway Manor. For more on Audrey, visit her at audreyleighjaber.com
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Bill Tomczak
BIll Tomczak started playing the clarinet a 9 years old. For all the wrong reasons. Blah, blah, blah, music major, blah blah.... DANCING!!! Bill was an avid dancer throughout the 80s of any kind of folk social dance. International, Scottish, English, Morris, Contra, whatever was on offer in the Boston area at the time. Sometime in there he started playing for dancing. Initially for Boston area International Folk Dances and forming his own band that ended up specializing in Balkan music. After a stint with a local Greek folk band and filling in here and there with small outfits of The Klezmer Conservatory Band, he moved on to Contra and English. Playing as a guest with many bands around the Northeast. The contra and English band BLT became heavily involved in the Vintage Dance scene and played for the Cincinnati Vintage Week for many years. Along the way, he's appeared as a member of Reckless Abandon, and a large version of Notorious.
Today he continues to play with the Latter Day Lizards around the US, but is more focused on the local scene around Portland, OR. He plays with Fine Companions (Erik Weberg, Betsy Branch, Lisa Scott) for English Country Dance and Campaign for Reel Time (Betsy Branch, Mark Douglass) for contras and English. He is also the arranger and leader of the horn section in the Portland Megaband run by Sue Songer.
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Christopher Jacoby
Christopher Jacoby (he/him) plays accordion, mandolin and guitar for Contras, English, and Scottish country dancing. He has performed in many bands and combinations over the years[1], but you might have seen him with: Audrey Jaber (and others), Wind Weavers, Ground Lift, Switching Protocols, Phoenix, and Last Exit. He can be heard on "Last Exit's Greatest Hits (by Last Exit)" [2], and the recently released "Remember Restaurants...?" by Audrey & Christopher. Christopher's non-dancing related hobbies include (but are not limited to): singing, sourdough and fermenting, Digital Audio & Audio Engineering, training computers to understand music, and workshop facilitation. He would be more than happy to talk to you about any of those things, should you end up at the same lunch table!
In addition to playing for Fall Frolick, Christopher Jacoby is our fabulous sound engineer.
[1] frequent conversation with his wife: "How many bands are you in?" "How do you define a band exactly? How many gigs do you need to play to be a band?"
[2] Only on CD! Contact Christopher for copies. You don't want to miss out, it's a great record.
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Hayden Stern
Hayden Stern is a fiddle player based in Seattle, WA. He is known for his driving fiddle sound and keen sense of improvisation and harmony, which he particularly enjoys bringing to English Country and contra dances. He is deeply motivated by collaboration and the magic that happens when musicians enter a flow state together. When not playing fiddle, he can be found knitting, birdwatching, or painting.
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Jeff Spero
Jeffrey Spero has become one of the premiere dance pianists on the west coast. Known for his energetic style and creative arrangements, Jeffrey has brought his talents to concerts, dances and festivals from coast to coast. Excelling in both English Country Dance and contradance styles, his accompaniments bring a fresh perspective to traditional forms. Through performances with The Syncopaths, Rhythm Raptors, and others, Jeffrey’s reputation as a highly sought after pianist has been well established.
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Rebecca King
Rebecca is a mainstay in the SF North Bay dance community for her piano playing and tune compositions. She is know internationally for recording collections of dances for Andrew Shaw with the band Persons of Quality, the most recent being The Irish Howle. Rebecca has also recorded on the Greenery CDs for Sharon Green, and recorded a solo piano CD named Nearer & Farther. Rebecca lives in Napa, CA with her husband, 2 cats, and 3 chickens.
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Shira Kammen
Multi-instrumentalist Shira Kammen has spent much of her life exploring the worlds of early and traditional music of all kinds. A member for many years of the early music Ensembles Alcatraz and Project Ars Nova, she has also worked with Sequentia, Hesperion XX, the Boston Camerata, storyteller/harpist Patrick Ball, singers Azam Ali and Joanna Newsom, the Balkan group Kitka, Anonymous IV, the King’s Noyse, the Newberry and Folger Consorts, The Compass of the Rose, Vajra Voices, Calextone, the Oregon, California and San Francisco Shakespeare Festivals, and is the founder of Class V Music, an ensemble dedicated to providing music on river rafting trips. She has worked with students in many different settings, among them teaching summer music workshops in the woods, coaching students of early music in such schools as Yale University, Case Western, the University of Oregon at Eugene, and working at specialized seminars at the Fondazione Cini in Venice, Italy and the Scuola Cantorum Basiliensis in Switzerland. Shira conducts a chamber chorus called Gallimaufry, and co-directs a women’s vocal ensemble, WAVE, and currently is music director for the California Revels. In the English Country Dance world, she is a member of the band Roguery and is always delighted to play music for dancing. She has played on a number of movie and television soundtracks, when weird medieval instruments are needed.
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