[Callers] Dance logs and record-keeping

[Amy Wimmer]

Well, I've danced to a caller who decided that the exact same program, with
the exact same memorized patter, would work in the same city if separated
by a week and in a different venue. Not so much.

-Amy

On Wed, Mar 7, 2018, 11:15 PM Yoyo Zhou via Callers <
callers at lists.sharedweight.net> wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 6, 2018 at 5:41 PM, Kalia Kliban via Callers <
> callers at lists.sharedweight.net> wrote:
>
>> Dance logs, a cumulative record for a series of which dances have been
>> called on any given evening, are very common in the English dance community
>> but vanishingly rare in the contra community.  Why is that? They're really
>> helpful for incoming callers, and it's probably nice for the dancers not to
>> keep getting the same dances week after week.
>>
>
> Another factor is that English dances usually specify the tune that goes
> with them. Contra dances very rarely do. So if a dance series has a house
> band that plays most of the time, as some of the Bay Area English dances
> do, then a repeated English dance may be the same figures done to the same
> tune played by the same musicians. For a contra, even if the same band
> played the same set of tunes, it's typical to change tunes partway through
> the dance, anyway, so it's hard to achieve the same degree of repetition.
>
> Of course, repetition isn't always looked down upon. I've heard that the
> weekly dance in Nelson, NH always has Chorus Jig on the program, and other
> dances that repeat week to week. Some contra dancers do appreciate
> recognizing dances - ah, Poetry in Motion, I know how that one goes.
>
> As Mac says, the type of repetition that contra dancers really notice is
> within an evening - when four dances in a row have heys, or half of the
> dances have Petronella turns, and all start to feel the same... and that's
> a type of repetition that's less likely to appear in ECD, where dances that
> have similar figures could easily be done to different tempos or meters.
>
> Personally, I keep track of all the dances that I've actually called,
> because I don't want to call the same dances all the time; most of the time
> it's slightly different from what I programmed originally. I add notes to
> myself if something didn't go well. I can't remember if I've been asked by
> organizers for my program, but it may have happened once or twice.
>
> Hope this helps!
>
> Yoyo Zhou
>
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