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Some things that I think make dances easy are:<br>
<br>
1) Stay within your minor set. Even easy appearing dances that leave
your minor set add a challenge that is often confusing. It's can (I
think) be slightly less confusing to do a simple double progression
than leave and return to a minor set.<br>
<br>
2) Use those plain English calls: ones that we understand without
having to learn a figure: circle left, right-hand turn, swing your
partner. Lines forward and back. Most people in my neck of the world
(Coastal California) know Do Si Do...<br>
<br>
3) A good story line. Getting into dances somewhat experienced
contra dancers find easy: A good story line. A dance built in a way
that flows in a way that fits into our concept of what comes next.
This concept is a bit more mystical. It's easy to identify these
dances: you can stop calling. A dance can have a lot of parts, but
somehow fit easily into our brains and movements.<br>
<br>
The things Alan mentions below are all worthy of consideration, too,
as are Larry Jennings' discussion in <i>Zesty Contras</i>, as well
as his rankings and marks in his transcriptions are worth looking at
again, and then again.<br>
<br>
~erik hoffman<br>
oakland, ca<br>
<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 4/19/2015 1:27 PM, Alan Winston via
Callers wrote:<br>
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Maia --<br>
<br>
While you can assign a level of difficulty of dances in isolation,
it doesn't really tell you the whole story. Whatever intrinsic
difficulty the dance possesses interacts with what the floor can
do right now and what the caller can put across. A dance that's
easy right after the break might have been fatally difficult as an
opener.<br>
A floor of relatively fit dancers with some level of experience
and no hearing impairment can do things easily that others can't
do at all.<br>
<br>
A caller can make any dance difficult, and a caller can put across
an intrinsically more difficult dance with clarity, confidence,
and precise prompting. So some of that suitability of dance to
crowd has to deal with the state of the caller. This makes it
hard to write down a rating on a card that's going to have meaning
when you use it.<br>
<br>
<br>
So what makes a dance easy, intrinsically?<br>
- strong flow<br>
- Low piece count<br>
- few or no fractions (some people can't hear, don't process, or
won't do the "and a half" part of 1 and 1/2;<br>
this is recoverable if the next thing is partner swing but bad
news if you need to do something else right <br>
away)<br>
- no action outside the minor set<br>
- clear progression <br>
- symmetry (because if the roles are the same there's less
confusion at the ends)<br>
- recovery point(s); moment of poise<br>
- sticking with your partner<br>
- straightforward end effects<br>
- familiar figures or figures that you can get without drill <br>
<br>
<br>
When I'm calling for a dance society dance where I have a strong
expectation that there'll be enough people for satisfactory
longways contras through the whole evening and there'll be more
experienced people than beginners and I know the strengths of the
band, I make up a program with what I think is increasing
intrinsic difficulty, figure variety, etc, maybe building up to a
medley with all figures in it handled earlier in the evening if
the organizers like medleys, cruising down to a satisfying
low-piece-count strong-flow dance as a finish. (If it's an
old-timey band that doesn't phrase strongly - some do - I try to
avoid dances that need tight timing; mushy Petronellas are
annoying.)<br>
<br>
But if it's something where I can't get a good read beforehand on
attendance, I have a file of easier contras and a file of harder
contras on my tablet computers and while this dance is running I'm
flicking through the file and picking the next dance based on my
current read of the floor, what figures they know already, what I
now think the band can do, etc.<br>
<br>
(You could just have twenty dances memorized and have all the
bases covered, but I like to have a bunch of different choices for
the same niches so that I stay out of the rut of only calling the
same twenty dances in front of the same people, since people dance
gypsy all over Northern California and you'll see the same ones
150 miles apart.)<br>
<br>
As you can guess, I don't have a quantified difficulty scale for
dances. I might mark "good opener", and I throw them into the
"easier" or "harder" piles. I don't find it worth doing more than
that because so much of the perceived difficulty is contextual
rathe than intrinsic.<br>
<br>
-- Alan<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 4/19/15 10:53 AM, Maia McCormick
via Callers wrote:<br>
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<div dir="ltr">As I overhaul my contra deck and realize that my
difficulty ranking system is super incoherent, and most of my
dance rankings are from way before I had any idea what
actually makes a dance easy or hard, I've been thinking of
scrapping this difficulty ranking system and just starting
over. So I was wondering: if you rank your dances by
difficulty, what is your system, what are your benchmarks for
various difficulty levels, what sorts of things do you
consider when determining the difficulty of a dance? If you<i> </i>DON'T
rank your dances, why not?
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Cheers,</div>
<div>Maia</div>
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