First off--Gregory Frock, where do you live that you're calling 30-40 dances a year? And are you the only caller in the area?

Joe-- There are theories in the contra world about how long a beginners session should be before the dance. Some believe that going in depth is the way to go, teaching many moves, and taking 30 minutes or more with the beginners. Others believe that getting the basic 3-4 moves down, and getting a feel for the contra rhythm, is plenty, and only takes 10 minutes, and does the rest of the teaching during the dance.

If you are teaching a class of beginning callers, I would suggest you do the "short lesson" re: indexing . And I'd recommend categorizing be a short discussion, after more important things are addressed, like...

-"What are your 3-4 favorite dances that were easier?.... Make a card for each of them." (If you can ask them this ahead of time, you could print out copies of the directions before your session, and hand them out.)

"What are your 3-4  favorite dances that were harder or more complex?... Make a card..." (Likewise, if you ask ahead, you can print some of them out.)

"Do you know where to look to find collections of contra dances? If not, here's some places.... Take time to read through these, and make a card for the ones you think would be a good dance to call, and that you think you could call well."

"ff you've got 10-20 dances, you should start there to put a program together. Let's talk about how an evening dance should flow... How do we put one together to make it  a great night?..."

Somewhere after all this.... "A big help as you collect more dances, and learn what's important about each of them TO YOU, you'll want to categorize in a way that makes sense to you. You can do it by difficulty level, do it by specific moves, do it by dance feel... whatever works best for you."

I apologize if you feel I'm talking down to you with this Contra 101 outline, you don't indicate if your new trainees have had any experience... But if I were a beginner, and you, in our fist session, started talking about the 15 recommended techniques for indexing cards, before I had even had the time or opportunity or guidance to just become a decent caller, I'd wonder how the hell that was supposed to help me now.

Becoming a new/better caller is a spiral path. After you make each learning loop upward, you're ready to understand some new things... Your intentions are good, you're just a spiral or two ahead of things, IMO.

Seth T was one of my two foundational teachers when I started calling, and I learned much from Diane S along the way, too. What they posted above speaks most practically to me. But you now have a good  list of suggestions on how to organize your dance library. When they're ready, with enough experience and dances to call, you could offer these newbies this list of solutions... Good luck with your training sessions!

Keith Tuxhorn

Springfield IL

On Wed, Jan 11, 2023 at 6:21 PM Amy Cann via Contra Callers <contracallers@lists.sharedweight.net> wrote:

As someone who *ran* a card sorter for IBM as my summer job working
through college,
I'm simultaneously laughing and shuddering.

My cards are the standard white kind -
except for the ones I wrote or rejiggered, they're on cream colored stock
Beckets are blue paper and double-progressions are green. Chestnuts
are light brown.

A pink highlighter stripe across the top means the two women have
action together (remember the days when that was heady?)
A blue stripe means the two men interact specifically. Yellow means
you escape your foursome somehow. Shadows get a grey pencil stripe.
Orange is particularly aerobic. Purple is proper.

Top left hand corner hand corner has a custom acronym - EFE means
"easy for experts", LNBD = "late night brain dead", FC = "feels cool"
but is actually simple.

Top right hand corner lists specific moves I prob. want to avoid doing
twice in a row - heys, down the center four-in-line.

The progression type is centered on the top edge.

If I fan them correctly, I can check everything at once.

Dances I do a lot are tattered.
Dances I do rarely are more pristine.

"Roll In the Hey" has a coffee stain.
"The Snow Dance" is missing a chunk I tore off to give someone my phone number.
"Baby Rose" was rolled up and used as an impromptu hot-pad for a stove
handle and doesn't stay flat.

Dances I learned prior to 1994 are in ballpoint.
After that it's finepoint felt tip.
Anything after 2018 when I started needing reading glasses is in thicker gauge.

I'm only on my second freezer-weight Ziploc bag, ever, and really proud of that.

:)

A



On 1/11/23, Joe Harrington via Contra Callers
<contracallers@lists.sharedweight.net> wrote:
> The short version of this post is, how should I organize my dances?  But,
> I'm sure if I ask that, the thread will have 100 replies and lots of
> confusion.  My search of the list archives and web were surprisingly spotty
> on this question, with lots of anecdotes and no summary or comparison.  And
> I'm not just asking for myself. While I've got a whopping 15 evenings of
> dance calling under my belt, I'm being called on to train some students to
> call for our college club, and they're asking the same question.
>
> So, I'm looking for one or more summaries from those wiser than I (ok, low
> bar!) of the kinds of systems for cards.  This might better be asked as,
> what are the different approaches to programming dances, and what
> organizing systems make each of those easier?
>
> In a workshop of his last summer, Bob Isaacs related his system of colored
> cards for easy, hard, bouncy, flowy, sweetheart, and divorce-reconcile
> dances (I think those were the categories). Call easy dances first, call a
> sweetheart right after the break when they're most likely to dance with the
> person they came with. Save hard for festivals.  Give them variety.
>
> But, I've wanted more categories, and what about finding the bouncy
> sweethearts?  I'm really busy, so the idea of re-copying a hundred or more
> cards to make a new system doesn't thrill me, if I don't like my initial
> system. Maybe I'll get a database system to select dances with, and then
> have a set of alphabetized printed cards for the actual calling, though
> what if I'm wrong and need to change my program, as has already happened a
> few times when a ton of newbies shows up?  I'm interested in hearing about
> anything particularly clever or efficient, especially if it doesn't involve
> a computer or tablet.
>
> A comparison of the different computer systems would also be welcome.  I'm
> aware of programs by Will Loving and Colin Hume.  I asked on one Facebook
> group for a comparison of these but got no response.  Is the Caller's Box
> up to real-time dance selection at an event? That presumes wi-fi, of
> course, or at least cell signal.
>
> I'll toss in one amusing and possibly workable paper system, for a
> dedicated and extremely nerdy caller, which might be me...
>
> I heard recently (I believe from Angela DeCarlis) of a mechanical sorting
> system based on the Jacquard loom concept that became the Hollerith punched
> card system.  I've never seen it in use.  Does anyone do this?
>
> Figure out the ten or so characteristics you might want to sort on.  For
> example, easy, medium, hard, bouncy, flowy, separates partners, sweetheart
> (keeps partners together), etc.  Take a stack of cards and drill holes near
> the bottom edge, one per characteristic (you can drill a stack of cards if
> you sandwich them between wood and clamp them).  Now, on a given card,
> punch out the rest of the paper between the hole and the edge of the card
> for each hole the card DOESN'T match.  So, for an easy dance, you'd punch
> out the rest of the paper for the medium and hard holes (among others), but
> leave the easy hole intact.  If you make a mistake, just fold a piece of
> tape over the gap above the hole to close the gap.
>
> Now, when you want to look at your easy, flowy, sweetheart dances, flip the
> stack so the holes are up, push a pencil or knitting needle through the
> "easy" hole and lift. Then, in the ones you pulled, push through the flowy
> hole and lift, and finally for that set poke through the sweetheart hole
> and lift.  Those are the easy, flowy, sweetheart dances.  If you want the
> medium or hard dances that are bouncy and that separate partners, you pull
> first the medium and then the hard dances, combine them, and then pull the
> bouncies from that set and the separators from that third pull.  And so on.
>
> Good hole alignment and clean punching would matter, I think.  If you are a
> real dance sorting fanatic, you could get like 30 holes around the card
> edges, but that would limit the writing space.
>
> I predict this will be all the rage, post-apocalypse...at least until we
> run out of cards. ;-)
>
> --jh--
> Joe Harrington
> Organizer, Greater Orlando Contra Dance
> Faculty Advisor, Contra Knights, the UCF contra dancing club
> contraknights.org
> FB, Ig: Contra Knights
> contradancerjoe@gmail.com
>
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