[Callers] Balancing LEFT in a wave?

Peter Simonyi dance at petersimonyi.ca
Sat Nov 11 09:09:59 PST 2017


I was in a dance with a similar sequence just last weekend.

Please bear in mind I'm piecing together memories from the middle of a
dance weekend.  The caller was either Mary Wesley or David Eisenstadter
and I can't recall enough context to decide who it was.  The part of
the dance I remember went like this:

ladies 4 steps in, balance wave R, L
gents in as ladies out, balance wave L, R
two gents allemande L half way, swing neighbour

I'm pretty sure I danced gent for most or all of this.

I thought that balancing left felt fine.  It didn't seem to be too
unidiomatic, and it did make the allemande left better.  Some parts of
the line were a little shakier on the left-first method but overall it
worked quite well.  It helped me that the caller pointed out that the
balance was toward the gent in your current foursome first -- "you're
still working with that neighbour".

In your case, it sounds as if the waves are where you meet a new
neighbour (or perhaps a shadow), and describing it as your first
interaction with that person might help make it feel more idiomatic to
balance toward them.  (But as others have pointed out, the allemande
right before the balance is another wrinkle to consider.)

Peter

On Wed, 2017-11-08 at 14:07 -0500, Maia McCormick via Callers wrote:
> Recently called a dance with an allemande R into long waves, balance
> wave, allemande L. Because of personal preference, I taught the
> balance as "balance left, then right", but cuz I didn't teach it all
> that clearly, the dancers defaulted back into balancing right first,
> and enough tricky stuff was happening in the dance that I didn't
> wanna correct them in flight.
> 
> I'm just wondering: do others agree that a balance left makes more
> sense / flows better in this context, or is this a weird personal
> preference? In your opinion, does the flow of the balance left
> outweigh its potential unidiomaticness?
> 
> Cheers,
> Maia
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