The SharedWeight archives are still somewhat in disarray.
I'm sure Seth is just as bothered as anyone by it and is working
to find a solution. Meanwhile, at the time of writing, I can
find the URLs above by going to
then clicking "Callers" in the left column, "LIst Archives" on
resulting page, and then either of the links marked "Date". While
the main page for the callers' list archive
currently only displays links for April and May of this year, it's
easy to guess how to modify the URLs listed at the beginning of
this message to look for archives from other months. (Searching,
alas, is still broken.)
I believe the specific video you're looking for is
by Colin Hume. Colin wrote:
And the YouTube video is correct (though naturally the band aren't
playing the tune I wrote for it).
The description in the video references Colin Hume's book
Dances With a Difference, Vol. 4. The dance is also described
in the 1999 and 2006 RPDLW syllabi (as I found thanks to
Michael Dyck's Contradance Index). The 2006 syllabus has this
note:
The author writes: “Kim Pankhurst challenged me to
write a longways dance where couples progressed
across the set rather than up and down. So some
couples progress the normal way; others just go
across and back. I’ve had people complain that they
didn’t progress, even though I had explained this—
one man was so annoyed that he walked out of the
dance! But men don’t complain that they don’t
progress in a square. You’re dancing with the same
partner and a different neighbor each time—does it
really matter which piece of floor you’re on?”
The dance description says that the dance is for "two
side-by-side [contra] sets that interact in the B part".
You might wonder what would happen if you tried to do it
with three of more sets interacting. (It's easy enough
to change the arch and dive figure in the B1 into an
ordinary pass through, so that people in the middle sets
don't have to identify "inside" and "outside" couples.)
If I've analyzed the choreography correctly, as the number
of sets increases, there will be more and more dancers who
not only stay near the same part of the floor, but also
nteract repeatedly with the same neighbors. Specifically,
with three sets, there will be dancers who interact with
familiar neighbors and new neighbors in alternate rounds.
With four or more sets there start to be some dancers who
interact with just two different neighbors over and over.
--Jim
I thought I'd saved a fairly recent discussion on 'transgressive contras'...there was one posting that had a link to a video of 2 contra lines where the 1's bounced back and forth from line to line in subsequent verses. Could some kind soul who did save that please email me the link and any relevant discussion they saved at
catherineaura@yahoo.com. Sadly I do not know how to access any archives...tried googling 'transgressive contra shared weight' and just brought up a long discussion from 2006
Many thanks!
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