[Callers] What do you do as caller when you're completely failing to reach a dancer?

Callers: (I should say, I'm used to dealing with clueless, drunk, not-listening ONS dancers, and I have a repertoire of incredibly-accessible material. So my usual approach at ONS is only to worry about people who are being dangerous, and not worry much about clueless, and to call material where you can be pretty far off and it still works. Even fairly-sophisticated contra-dance falls into that realm, because somebody will be along to swing you, circle with you, etc, pretty soon. So this is maybe an English-specific problem, but I'm suspecting not.) I co-called the Palo Alto English last night with Lise Dyckman. (We expected a somewhat challenging night because many of the strongest local dancers are off at Spring Fever weekend.) Got a decent turnout (24+), about a third of them first-timers or quite new dancers. One guy (50ish, not visibly impaired, seemed nice enough) showed up with a group about 10 minutes late. When it got to be my turn to call, I gave an abridged version of the orientation session (up, down, in, out, partner, neighbor, dance with anybody). Naturally, he did the first two dances in a row with one of the women he'd come in with. He was clueless and active (don't know what to do, must do something, do something random); she was clueless and passive (don't know what to do, will wait until somebody makes me do something). First, I commend the community of dancers who were there that night. They pretty soon got that couple separated; didn't display visible impatience, and continued helpful and welcoming, without grabbing, pulling, and pushing. Good work, everybody! Here are things that didn't seem to help this guy in any visible way: - continuing to call the dance when everybody else had it - doing demos of things that we otherwise would not (eg, Trip to Tunbridge) - having dancers in his set beckon or point, as appropriate - strong partners who tried to lead him (by whatever means) where he needed to go - pointing out other people in the line in the same role to copy from. - second walkthroughs I gave up following a problem couple up and down the set and calling to just them years ago; that almost never works and just raises everybody's anxiety level. I don't think it would have helped here. We tweaked our program to the simpler end of the things we'd been thinking about, but didn't revert to the one-night-stand/barn-dance level, since that wasn't what the vast majority of people there had come for. [To be honest, I didn't even consider that - which I've done when, eg, the whole not-previously-dancing Revels children's chorus turned up unexpectedly at a country dance I was calling, expecting to dance - but if I had consciously considered it, I would have discarded it for that reason.] I could see that he was never really managing to build a model of the dance, and that he was, if anything, a kinetic learner. (Eg, in Portabella, where if you're a 1 the A1 is gent cast off with partner behind and orbit through 2s place and back to place, and B2 is 1s cross, cast, and half-figure eight, he seemd to have some kind of memetic entrapment where having crossed he'd turn back and follow his partner down the wrong side, as though it were A1 again.) I don't think he ever connected pieces of music to pieces of dance. It wasn't "he's got it except for"; I don't think he ever understood the basics of any dance well enough to be able to fix the parts that weren't working. He sat down at the last dance before the break and didn't dance again the rest of the evening. Now, maybe he's just not cut out for this. (I think that if somebody threw me into a football game in progress, and I just got a brief description in the huddle of what I was supposed to do and I didn't understand how timeouts worked, etc, I'd look completely clueless and overwhelmed, and there are ways in which this is like that. It was more like a football game than usual, actually, because among the things he never understood was the difference between going down the inside of the set and the outside of the set, so there were considerably more near-collisions than usual. I'm not cut out for football, but if I got a bunch of explanations, coaching, and questions answered, I would at least look more like I knew what was going on. And of course he didn't get that.) But maybe my bag of tricks isn't deep enough. What do you to do reach somebody like this? When do you know to let it go? -- Alan -- =============================================================================== Alan Winston --- WINSTON(a)SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU Disclaimer: I speak only for myself, not SLAC or SSRL Phone: 650/926-3056 Paper mail to: SSRL -- SLAC BIN 99, 2575 Sand Hill Rd, Menlo Park CA 94025 ===============================================================================