[Callers] "Second" ONS

[Rich Sbardella]

Often when I close a ONS dance with a circle, I have the dancers find their
original parents for a swing  & promenade.
Rich


On Wed, Oct 24, 2018 at 5:14 PM jim saxe via Callers <
callers at lists.sharedweight.net> wrote:

> Good advice from both Alan and Rich.  I agree with Rich that you could
> repeat more than one well-received dance from last time.
>
> Alan wrote:
>
> > and have a couple slightly more challenging ones - with progression, etc
> - up your sleeve but without any emotional investment in actually using
> them.
>
> Definitely agree on the "without any emotional investment" part.
> Long-term, do you have an ambition for these events to evolve into "contra"
> dances, or would you be happy as a clam to keep having events where
> facility at ending a swing side-by-side with the _____ on the left and the
> _____ on the right is not an important skill, so long as you have a room
> full of smiling dancers?
>
> I have a few comments and questions about your notes:
>
> The notes say "beginner's lesson (circle, Lark Raven, ...)" but the dance
> descriptions use "ladles" and "gentlespoons".  What terms did you actually
> use?  If you used "Larks" and "Ravens", did you say anything at all about
> their relation to traditional gender roles?  In practice how much
> correlation was there between what people looked like and which role they
> danced in?
>
> Leaving aside the waltz and the polka, it looks like the only two dances
> where the roles of Lark/Gentlespoon vs. Raven/Ladle were significant were
> the roll away dance and Mad Scatter.
>
> Notes on the roll away dance say "succeeded at walkthrough, weren't going
> to make it through the dance."  If you could tell, did the confusion seem
> to have to do with figuring out wha was in what role, or was it mostly
> about something else, such as getting from the star to the lines of four?
>
> [Two side comments on that dance: (1) Notes say "This variation is Wade
> Pearson's, removing the right-left-through. ...", but the "original"
> version you link to doesn't have a right and left through.  It has a cross
> trail.  (2) Personally, I don't think it would be a great loss to drop this
> dance from the repertoire, regardless of the role terminology or the manner
> of setting up the lines of four.  I could say more on both points but don't
> want to go even further off topic.]
>
> The other dance description that mentions the roles is Mad Scatter.  How
> did that work out in practice?  I note that it doesn't really matter which
> member of each pair goes into the center for an allemande or star and which
> one orbits, provided nobody minds who they get for new partner.  But I'm
> curious about what actually happened.
>
> Notes on Mad Scatter say "Avoid a mixer last even though they voted for
> it."  Do you have reason to believe that people were disappointed about
> that?  I certainly know of many dance series where people would bristle at
> having a mixer as the "last" dance of the evening (even if followed by a
> waltz as the really last dance), but I'm wondering whether you actually
> sensed such bristling at your event.  Note also Rich's comment on ending a
> barn dance with a circle mixer.
>
> --Jim
>
> _______________________________________________
> List Name:  Callers mailing list
> List Address:  Callers at lists.sharedweight.net
> Archives:  https://www.mail-archive.com/callers@lists.sharedweight.net/
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sharedweight.net/pipermail/callers-sharedweight.net/attachments/20181024/c4d168b4/attachment.html>