MotherTown - The picturesque string of lights hanging in the Berlin Town Hall’s second floor windows served as a beckoning magnet in the night for the evening’s contra dance featuring music by the Berlin Country Orchestra. The early crowd of a couple dozen people was itching to start.

“Let’s dance,” declares caller Dave Bateman, just before the scheduled 8 p.m. starting time. “If someone shows up on time, they’ll be late.”

The Berlin Country Orchestra has been playing these shows since 1989. Sandy Davis co-founded the group when he moved to Berlin from Acton in the late 1980s.

“He got to know a few people in town and he kind of talked around and said, ‘If anybody’s interested in starting a little band, we’re going to meet at my house once a week,’” explained acoustic guitarist Linda Wheeler. “He said, ‘You don’t even really need to know how to play an instrument because we’ll all sort of progress together.’”

“Most of us didn’t even know what contra dancing was,” Wheeler said. “Sandy just has a real love of live music and wanted to bring the community spirit of dancing to the community.” Over the next six months, they practiced hard and learned enough tunes to play a dance. After a few annual performances, they expanded to three dances a year to the current October through May schedule, with a few Sunday afternoon free community dances for families, weddings and HudsonFest appearances thrown in.

Their music is basically English and Irish fiddle tunes written for dance.

“They’re 32-bar little tunes,” Wheeler said. “They usually have an A and a B part. The A has 16 bars and the B has 16 bars and you repeat them and you kind of play the same tunes over and over and repeat them for the dancing.”

For most of the past decade, the dances were held at the First Parish Church, while the hall, built in 1870, was renovated.

“The whole building wasn’t occupiable,” said Walter Bickford, who played a major role in the renovations. “The last time it was remodeled was in the late ‘20s or the early ‘30s.”

He smiled as he motioned to the dance floor. “This is what I had in mind when I was down in the cellar digging out rotting beams.”

Caller Bateman lists four things necessary to have a good time at a contra dance.

“One, if you show up, you’ve succeeded,” he said. “Two, smile. Three, enjoy the band and the music. Four, meet new friends.”

Tom and Ruth (“first names only please”) are out dancing for the night.

“It’s a pretty friendly crowd,” Ruth said. “It’s a good way to get exercise without feeling it’s exercise.”

They’re glad to make newcomers feel comfortable. “If you keep trying, you make the same mistakes,” Tom laughed. “And then you make them again, but we always try to help the inexperienced ones along.”

On this evening, that’s a good thing, as half the crowd, which ranges from just born to 70 in age, a great mix of dance aficionados, high school students and parents with their young children, seems to be contra dancing for the first time.

“You can’t learn by not doing,” Bateman announces, beckoning the hesitant to join in. “If you bump into someone, you can meet and exchange insurance cards,” he chuckled. “This is no-fault dancing.” Within 20 minutes, strangers have already started to become friends.

Banjo and mandolinist Martin Miller estimated he’s played dances like these for almost 20 years, watching the dance patterns challenge the newcomers.

“It always looks like it’s not going to work out but it always does,” Miller said.

“Some apologize if they mess up the dance but it’s not true,” Bateman said. “It’s no big deal. You learn the dance with your arms and legs before your brain does because the moves are repeated every 30 seconds.”

You might even remember three dreaded terms from your grammar school days: “Do-si-do. Cross over move. Allemande.”

David and Cathy Trahan of Boylston have their youngsters strapped to their backs. Andy, 2, is clapping his hands behind his father’s head as they duck beneath an arch made by some of the other dancers. None of this fazes Andy, whom you’d think would scream of fright. Instead, he’s having the time of his life.

“He loves it,” said father David Trahan. “Whenever you tell him he’s going dancing, he gets excited. He likes spinning around and holding his hands in the air.”

“He’s been dancing since he as one month old, Trahan said. “Actually, when Cathy was pregnant we’d come dancing, so he was dancing all along.” Mary Rinker, the children’s grandmother, usually accompanies them.

As home schoolers, the Trahans find contra dances are great places for their children to meet other kids.

“We go to a lot of the dances here and in Worcester and Northborough,” David said. “We’re dancing if we can. This is classic New England here.”

Bateman, who lives in Portsmouth, N.H., has been calling contra dances since 1989.

“All along 495 there’s a bunch of nice dances like this,” he said. “It’s not unusual to meet someone and end up in a long-term relationship and getting married.”

In Berlin, waltzes played before the intermission and end of the night are a great chance to get closer for the first time.

While performing, Martin Miller gets great pleasure realizing, “People were doing these same dances here many years ago.”

Wheeler agreed. “It’s kind of neat to bring that space back to life with the idea that that’s probably originally what it was built for.”

They’re joined in BCO by bassist Don Davis, fiddler and mandolin player Jerry Miller, Celtic drummer Sean Regan, pianist Michael Kearney and fiddler Evy Dueck.

“I joined the group five years ago,” said Dueck, who played classical music in the Boston area before moving to Berlin. Her children have grown up with the music. “They wouldn’t know any other,” she said. “It’s happy music.” She said the group’s weekly practices are “half social, half playing. We all do it for fun, it’s not work.”

The group has an open lineup. On this occasion, Dick Hyland, who performs with Dueck in the Polymorphous String Band, sits in on guitar. Nancy Dallaire gave the group two pianists. “At one recent show, her family came and gathered around the piano after the dance and started singing and that was kind of fun too,” Wheeler said.

Only the caller gets paid; after expenses, the rest of the money goes into a general band fund which has bought a new sound system and helps fund the two free Sunday afternoon family dances each year. The BCO receives support from the Berlin and Massachusetts Culture Commission, Clinton Savings Bank, and LINK, Inc., the Berlin Memorial School’s parent-teacher-community organization.

Around 9:15 p.m., eight 20-somethings from Boston arrive. Their appearance has already become part of BCO folklore.

“This guy was getting married and then shipped out to Dubai,” Dueck said. “They wanted to celebrate. They looked online and found our dance and a picture of our building and he said, ‘I want to dance in that building.’”

The night ended with BCO becoming a makeshift swing band to send the visitors home happy.

“They brought so much energy into the room,” Wheeler said. “That was really fun to see them kicking up their heels.”

And that, Wheeler said, is the whole point. “For people in the community who have been shy about checking it out, contra dancing is a wonderful way to socialize and dance in a group setting,” she said. “You don’t have to be a fancy dancer. You don’t have to really know how to dance at all to dance contra dance. You just learn as you go. It’s very forgiving.”

The final Berlin Country Orchestra contra dances of the season are on April 7 and May 5 at 8 p.m. at the Berlin Town Hall, 12 Woodward Ave. just off Route 62, Berlin. For more information, call 978-273-8238. For information on other regional contra dances, visit Neffa.org. Brian Goslow can be reached at bgoslow@yahoo.com.