21 Jun
2013
21 Jun
'13
6:03 p.m.
On 6/21/2013 12:52 PM, Alan Winston wrote:
My hypothesis is that these are people who are still
drinking from the
firehose.
I _love_ this image.
(The first time you come you hear everything important about
contra dancing and probably get exposed to half or
more of the common
figures. It's a big cognitive load. The second time you hear the same
things again and get exposed to many fewer new-to-you figures, and by
the third time you might be successfully associating the figures with
the names - the flow of novelty is at a trickle and easy to absorb.)
They're not ignoring the caller, per se, but they don't have CPU left
over to process the prompts and in any case the words aren't really
meaning anything to them yet; if a prompt changes what they're doing
they're going to take four-six beats to get organized enough to respond
to the prompt. )
This will get sorted out if they keep coming back, probably. But they
may be less likely to return if they were confused and overstretched
through the whole evening, and this is the kind of thing that leaves you
confused.
What do you guys do about this kind of thing? I already keep prompting
clearly and in a timely way, refrain from shouting "No!" over the
microphone, don't lose my cool (a place that took me a while to get to,
incidentally). What else can I do to help these people succeed?
I run into this periodically as well, and haven't found a way to
verbally interrupt whatever's going on in their heads. It may be that
they're so overloaded that further verbal info just can't get in. I've
had some success with going onto the floor and physically guiding folks
through a move (easier with English than with contra, simply because
there's more space in the dance in which to insert myself without being
an obstacle). I've often found that even standing directly in their
line of vision and pointing straight up or down the set (say, for 4
changes of a circular hey) doesn't work. It's like they're specifically
excluding _any_ outside input, which makes my job very challenging.
It's especially difficult in that situation to be fair to the rest of
the room, who may also need some guidance, if all my attention is on
keeping the trainwreck-in-progress from happening.
Tough situation. Much harder when I'm calling from a stage and can't
really get onto the floor.
Kalia