Whoops, I never came back to this, but, some exercises I've done/seen/considered:
- half the room gets the walkthrough and half doesn't, the ones who got the walkthrough need to guide the others through the dance NONVERBALLY
- nonsense dance: substitute all the dance vocab with random words, define a few terms for every dancer, call a nonsense dance and the hall has to piece together what's what
- excision dance (requires real tight collab with the band): take a simple dance and, once the hall has it, you and the band conspire to just drop 8 or 16 counts at a time (or more!) and dancers need to get themselves in place for the next move. E.g. if the dance ends with a chain + star and starts with a new neighbor, you might call "robins chain... new neighbor balance and swing" and the band goes to the top of A1 (i.e. cutting out the last 8 beats of B2). Dancers need to know how the dance flows and where moves start and end to compensate for missing moves
- noodly beginners: this one is a Lindsey Dono gem. You've got a bunch of friends coming, they're raw beginners, who will volunteer to dance with them and get them through the next dance? And the friends in question turn out to be... pool noodles. How do dancers accommodate partners who quite literally can't do a single thing?
- esp. in very slanted halls, I've challenged dancers to do a dance with lots of movement up/down the line (think 3-33-33) without the sets getting bent out of shape. That's it, that's the whole challenge.
- a good exercise on its own or can be combined with the above: practice dropping a full hands-4 out of the set. This is a recovery skill that isn't necessarily taught, but if e.g. one dancer has an injury or urgently needs to drop out, the thing to do is to remove your entire hands-4 from the set (and people can re-enter from the bottom if they still want to dance). I ran around with various hats, placing them on people's heads to denote an "injury"—that person had to then nonverbally get their hands-4 out of the set, and was then licensed to put the "injury" hat on someone else's head. (Could also be done with tagging people out.)
- i've seen some dancers put bandanas on arms/hands/shoulders to represent an injury, and folks interacting with them need to notice and be cognizant of it/modify around it
- i wrote my dance
Neighbor, Neighbor on the Wall for an exercise where the first time meeting this neighbor, you communicated a preference or stylistic request about the swing, and the second time you met them, you got to enact that preference/request.
- "practice saying no": normal dance but dancers are encouraged to non-verbally say "no thank you" to flourishes/spins/fancy things at least n times during the dance. Good practice for communicating and listening for non-verbal "no's"
- beginner detection: randomly assign beginner-like dance flaws to a number of the dancers (think "always a beat late", "dizzy", "grips tight and moves slow", "always looks in the wrong direction", etc.). Dancers without an assigned flaw practice quickly evaluating someone they're dancing with and getting a sense of skill level/whether they need extra help, and then providing that help. (If you want to "check people's work", you could at the end have all the assigned-beginner dances identify themselves, and everyone else can see if they clocked folks correctly.)
I've done a lot of workshops like this so I've got a lot of junk to suggest, ha. Hope some of this is useful (and that I haven't missed my window for suggesting things—apologies for the delay!). Let us know how it goes!
Cheers,
Maia
--Maia McCormick (she/her)
917.279.8194