Hi,
My wife and I are in our first year of calling whole programs, and they've been fun and gone well.
Here are some tips we've learned from various callers that have coached us.
> We've been drafting our program about 5-7 days ahead, to practice those dances the most.
> We use the built in voice recorder app on one iphone, and music from another device to record the walkthrough & calling the entire dance, starting with 4 word calls, and getting to 1-2 word calls about the 4th time through, and then dropping out the calls that we think the dancers will all remember. (often the swing, and maybe right before that). Then we DANCE to the recording, which is fun, and spots any little things we need to improve. Claire Takemori gave us this advice.
> Claire also suggested videoing our walkthroughs and calling to dancers, which I hesitated a little, but we did the last 3 nights. And we can learn how to improve by watching or listening. (on youtube as
robandamandacaller@gmail.com)
> Bob Isaacs strongly advises writing/ typing our your walkthroughs for each dance. And he gives feedback if we send them to him. The walkthrough begin concise and clear is very essential to the dancers starting out great with good calling.
And when I revisit a written walkthrough after a month or more, I see lots of opportunities to improve it. (We don't read from it at a dance, but you learn what you want to try to do by writing it, and where the trickiest figures / transitions are.
> Doing the program a few days ahead lets you see which figures will be new each dance and need to be taught in the walkthrough.
> We listen to lots of contra music in the car, on spotify (Rodney Miller, Toss the Possum, Ed Howe, etc) And there are some calling practice playlists, like one Seth Tepfer referred us to: by "callerboi". We started counting to 8, but Bob & Ed suggested we count to 16 to start learning whether we are in A1, A2, B1 or B2. This has helped a lot.
> Use music that is similar to the band you will be playing with to practice and record calling the dances. For our December 23 dance, I contacted Wolf Moon String Band and they kindly provided about 8 tracks (since I couldn't find any examples on youtube or spotify).
> How much do we practice? We are not that musical and we have practiced a ton, but maybe that will start to level off. But the recording your calling to challenging music and dancing to it is FANTASTIC practice with a new dance, and recording the walkthrough. We were just at a week long dance and it seemed maybe a couple open callers had probably never practiced a few walkthroughs (just a handful).
> In Atlanta we've been having a weekly calling practice on Wed. for Contra and English callers for over a year, and it's been well attended and we usually have 8-12 dancers. It's at a very generous dancer's house.
We definitely notice improvement from practicing!!
Hope this helps!
Rob