Oddly enough, I was just in Seattle at the end of February and had a conversation about this with Lindsey Dono, who told me to my surprise that dancers at Lake City, at least, will complain about getting the same dance two weeks in a row, and said that there *was* a log kept of dances called locally.
So, Amy, I suggest checking with Lindsey and see if the effort is already under way.
In the SF Bay Area, I think our dance populations kinda slop
around, so that while a core of people may go to the central Bay
Area dances (SF, Berkeley, Palo Alto), East Bay people may also go
to North Bay dances (San Rafael, Petaluma) and North Bay people
may go to Berkeley or SF but not usually Palo Alto, while Monterey
Bay people (Monterey, Santa Cruz) go to those dances and some come
up to Palo Alto, and some South Bay people (Palo Alto, San Jose,
etc) go to Santa Cruz or Monterey. The result is that every
dancer does the dances that are called at the dances they happen
to go to, it would be a huge coordinating effort to keep all the
dances at different dance series with somewhat-overlapping
attendance separate, and nobody but callers seems to care anyway.
For me personally, different band, different tune set pretty much equals different dance even with the same figures - but also dances that are 3/4 the same figures as other dances feel like the same dances anyway.
-- Alan
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.
I've only ever known of one contra series that kept a log, and it's
probably because I suggested it when they started out (the Queer Contra
series in Oakland, CA). Are there any contra organizers out there who
maintain a dance log? Those of you who do, how do you get the dance
lists from the callers? The Oakland series had a little book on the
stage and the callers would write their programs down as they went or at
the end of the night.
Part of it comes down to record-keeping on the part of the callers. I
keep a personal log of all the dances I've called so I can avoid
repeating myself when I return to a given venue. That makes it easy for
me to produce a set list after the fact if an organizer wants to fill in
a gap in the log. Fellow contra callers, do you all keep records of
what you call, and if you don't, how do you avoid repeating yourself or
remember what worked well (or not) the last time you called at a
particular place?
If you work with something like Caller's Companion, do you update the
program list with what you actually danced as opposed to what you
programmed?
Just curious about other people's process on this.
Kalia in Sebastopol, CA
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