[Callers] 4 person do-si-do?

Hilton Baxter via Callers callers at lists.sharedweight.net
Tue Dec 1 09:10:16 PST 2015


I wrote a dance with a 4 person do-si-do and have called it a few times. 
Whoever has to travel from the far corners will need an extra couple of 
beats, so it's good to have a "soft" figure after the do-si-do for 4, so 
the folks arrive late (men, in your dance, Luke) can catch up somewhat 
gracefully.

As for treating it as a gypsy for 4, in my dance people liked going 
forward and then twirling away to the right and back to place. This was 
probably because it gave some ccw movement to contrast cw turns 
elsewhere in the dance. To teach the figure, I've had dancers do a RH 
star "but just pretend to touch"  then walk through with twirls over L 
shoulder.

Hilton Baxter



On 12/1/15 10:22 AM, Aahz Maruch via Callers wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 01, 2015, Luke Donforth via Callers wrote:
>> Possibly this is a choreographic question already answered in square
>> dancing, but I'm not familiar with the outcome. How well does a four person
>> do-si-do work? I'm thinking of something along the lines of:
> In the normal duple improper formation, a four-person do-si-do is called
> zigzag, there are lots of dances with that.  But that's not what you're
> doing here.
>
>> In my head, the four person do-si-do is a right hand star sans hands; but
>> not sure how well it'll fly; especially since the right diagonal women have
>> less far to turn to face in than the left diagonal women coming out of the
>> chain.
>  From my POV, that's a four-person gypsy.  Or maybe the square dance
> equivalent would be promenade inside the ring.  The key element of
> do-si-do is facing the same direction during the movement (modulo the
> contra variant of a spinning do-si-do or square dancing's highland fling)
> and ending up facing the same direction at the end.
>
> I recently saw a square dance caller struggle with explaining Walk Around
> the Corner (which is square dancing's equivalent of gypsy) and See Saw,
> failing to mention either of the "easy" ways of getting across the
> concept:
>
> * keep your shoulder toward the person you're walking around
>
> * exactly the same thing as an armless allemande
>
> Anyway, there are probably several ways to call what you want, but I
> think that do-si-do ain't one of them.  ;-)



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