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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>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CAHUcZGPHaCuWAZv+d+6EX1aJ7D25CDSvJUFD=VLYV8g43Fyr6A@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
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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>
</div>
<br>
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