Re: [Callers] Circle & pass through as the last move of a dance

I agree that the caller trying to teach too much verbally gets pointless very quickly. There are definitely pointers that callers can give that will help dancers a bunch, but they should be given quickly and succinctly, and/or shown through demonstration ("try the allemande the angry, competitive way! Now try a noodle-arm allemande. Okay, now try it a way that feels better to both of you.") It's distressingly easy for a caller to make him/herself tune-out-able. Along the lines of what Jonathan said, I'd be wary of even bringing up "beats" to dancers at all. A lot of dancers aren't necessarily even familiar with that terminology, or at least don't think of dancing in terms of beats/phrase length, so to make a passing mention to the number of beats something takes may be MORE confusing than not mentioning it all. Instead, I would go with something like "the circle left is faster than you think!" or "make sure you pass through in time to balance your next neighbor!" (and then be really precise with calling the balance so it lines up directly with the big beat--dancers on the whole tend to FEEL the beat 10x better than they intellectually understand it). On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 6:09 PM, Greg McKenzie <grekenzie(a)gmail.com> wrote: