Hi, Luke,

Great to see you at ValleyCopia and ContraCopia this past weekend. Enjoyed your sets! :)

Carol Ormand wrote a dance with a double do-si-do. I'm afraid I can't remember the name and I don't have my cards handy at the moment. It's in either Jurassic Redheads or Lizard Research Institute.

I also danced it and remember that it took some time to teach and was rather technical. By technical, I mean that every time we got to that move in the dance, I felt like I had to drop out of the flow and pay attention to the mechanics of the move and to avoiding the other dancers. When it worked, it was *really* cool. More often than not, however, it was more like just avoiding the other dancers and getting back to place in time.

Not suggesting that it doesn't or can't work, just that you'll want to teach it very clearly and make sure it fits into and adds value to the dance's story line.

Thanks for keeping the creative juices going.

On Tue, Dec 1, 2015 at 4:03 PM, Luke Donforth via Callers <callers@lists.sharedweight.net> wrote:

Thanks all for the feedback. I appreciate having this list to kick ideas around.

While it would be possible for the do-si-dos to happen in two groups of 2; in my opinion that would make this a particularly non-interacting 4x4; as the only whole group of 8 interaction at that point is the circle half way; and thus not worth getting into 4x4 formation for just that.

As for my comment about the ladies after the chain.

After the give&take - swing, the lines are:
w3 m1 w4 m2
m3 w1 m4 w2

When the women chain to the partner, if they went straight up and down, they're ending up back at:
w1 m1 w2 m2
m3 w3 m4 w4
after being courtesy turned through 180 degrees.

Except the next move is happening in the center, so as w2 and w3 are being courtesy turned, they'll be facing into the center after maybe 140 degrees of rotation; whereas w1 and w4 have to turn about 220 degrees to face into center.

As for language, I think I may have muddied the issue; so thank you for demonstrating all the ways that my instructions could be interpreted. Always a learning experience. A handless star/promenade inside/4 person gypsy is not quite what I had in mind, although they're all basically the same path on the floor and certainly what I described. I'd envisioned folks getting to do-si-do with as little or as much twirling as the wanted; but as folks pointed out, the DSD twirl is the opposite direction of the big picture rotation.

If I can get dancers to test it, I might describe it as "all four women, do-si-do your opposite woman while dodging the other two"

Given that's how I'm thinking of it; the fact that my description involves "dodging" might be a sign it's not such a great idea. The promenade inside or star options might be more timing resilient; although I like the idea of letting folks safely twirl when they want.

I'll keep turning it over in my head, and try to get guinea pigs to dance it (there's something that would go viral on youtube...)

Thanks for being a community to talk about dancing with :-)
Luke

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