13 Feb
2014
13 Feb
'14
7:32 a.m.
On 2/12/2014 10:54 PM, Aahz Maruch wrote:
On Wed, Feb 12, 2014, Greg McKenzie wrote:
Aahz, when Greg says "callers at open public contra dances" he really,
really means it. The MWSD world is almost the
opposite of what he's talking about. I:f you can figure that anyone at
your dance has been to classes and knows figures,
you can do a lot differently.
Greg's idea is that at OPCD, anybody can walk through the door, receive
no lesson from a caller, and be swept up by the experienced dancers (eg,
anyone who's ever done it before); the caller needs to avoid it making
it unattractive for experienced dancers to dance with newcomers (eg,
running dances a shorter time so that experienced dancers will know
they're not making a huge time commitment if they dance with a
newcomer), conveying the dance with effective word order and perfect
timing, and pretty much not teaching anything, leaving that up to the
experienced dancers.
MWSD caller responsibility: Call an entertaining program at whatever
level the dance is advertised to be that works for the people there.
OPCD caller responsibility: Integrate the floor as much as possible and
stay out of the way of the teaching that's happening on the floor.
(Greg, is that fair?)
-- Alan
Well-structured calling is not easy. It does
however make a subtle but
significant difference in how confident the dancers feel--particularly at
open, public social events. That is why I structure my calls carefully and
write the calls out verbatim on my cards. That is also why I advocate for
callers at open public contra dances to use dance cards when calling.
Making up calls on the fly often puts the onus on the dancers to get the
timing right.
While I don't particularly disagree with you, particularly for
me at this
stage in my calling career, I do find it interesting that your advice to
avoid making up calls on the fly is almost universally ignored by MWSD
callers -- and with the majority of square dance callers (which is to
say, almost all the good ones), it's not the dancers who face the onus of
getting the timing right.