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

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