Re: [Callers] Card boxes and Dance ending

When a dance ends involves at least two things: 1. The dancers 2. The band. 1. Assuming you are calling at a "typical" modern contra dance, the dancers will dance without the caller after a few rounds. After they have done this for a while, there is a point at which the dancers will start making mistakes. The dance is getting close to the end at that point. (An observant caller will be watching for this and not asssume that once the dancers get going they can be ignored.) Try not to end when folks are having trouble: get them back on track, give them a couple more, and then go out. Note: this is not an overt breakdown, but just more folks forgetting where they should be or what comes next. It can be easy to miss from the stage. 2. The band will be working through a set of tunes and will be swapping leads and energy and will have a sense of what they want to do with a tune. I try to tap into that energy and end when it feels like the band is ready. Hard to explain, but definitely do-able. Also, it is not courteous to your musicians to end a dance if they have just switched tunes. Let them play any new tune at least three times. Often that means, if I am about to say "twice more" and I see them about to switch tunes, I will change it to four more (in my own mind...everyone knows that musicians can't count higher than "two more times" <BG>) and wait to go out. When a dance ends will also vary with the dance itself. An imbalanced dance will need to have shorter sets but run longer than an everyone equal dance. A dance with everyone moving intensely will often want to run shorter than one that is a bit more relaxed. A lot of this is pretty subtle. Calling is, after all, an art. About keeping your dances, it probably doesn't matter a whole lot how you keep them, but I want to put in a vote for weeding out mediocre material once in a while. I just have a pile of cards. There's no order except I do have them color coded for contra, squares and other. They get mixed up and sorted through many different ways. And the more that happens, the better for my choices. I don't keep cards for one-night-stand material. If a dance can't be remembered from the title only, it's too complicated for a one-night-stand. HTH, Beth Parkes ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Giusti" &lt;David.Giusti(a)oberlin.edu&gt; To: &lt;callers(a)sharedweight.net&gt; Sent: Sunday, January 14, 2007 1:30 PM Subject: [Callers] Card boxes and Dance ending