Some things that I think make dances easy are:

1) Stay within your minor set. Even easy appearing dances that leave your minor set add a challenge that is often confusing. It's can (I think) be slightly less confusing to do a simple double progression than leave and return to a minor set.

2) Use those plain English calls: ones that we understand without having to learn a figure: circle left, right-hand turn, swing your partner. Lines forward and back. Most people in my neck of the world (Coastal California) know Do Si Do...

3) A good story line. Getting into dances somewhat experienced contra dancers find easy: A good story line. A dance built in a way that flows in a way that fits into our concept of what comes next. This concept is a bit more mystical. It's easy to identify these dances: you can stop calling. A dance can have a lot of parts, but somehow fit easily into our brains and movements.

The things Alan mentions below are all worthy of consideration, too, as are Larry Jennings' discussion in Zesty Contras, as well as his rankings and marks in his transcriptions are worth looking at again, and then again.

~erik hoffman
oakland, ca

On 4/19/2015 1:27 PM, Alan Winston via Callers wrote:

Maia --

While you can assign a level of difficulty of dances in isolation, it doesn't really tell you the whole story. Whatever intrinsic difficulty the dance possesses interacts with what the floor can do right now and what the caller can put across. A dance that's easy right after the break might have been fatally difficult as an opener.
A floor of relatively fit dancers with some level of experience and no hearing impairment can do things easily that others can't do at all.

A caller can make any dance difficult, and a caller can put across an intrinsically more difficult dance with clarity, confidence, and precise prompting. So some of that suitability of dance to crowd has to deal with the state of the caller. This makes it hard to write down a rating on a card that's going to have meaning when you use it.

So what makes a dance easy, intrinsically?
- strong flow
- Low piece count
- few or no fractions (some people can't hear, don't process, or won't do the "and a half" part of 1 and 1/2;
this is recoverable if the next thing is partner swing but bad news if you need to do something else right
away)
- no action outside the minor set
- clear progression
- symmetry (because if the roles are the same there's less confusion at the ends)
- recovery point(s); moment of poise
- sticking with your partner
- straightforward end effects
- familiar figures or figures that you can get without drill

When I'm calling for a dance society dance where I have a strong expectation that there'll be enough people for satisfactory longways contras through the whole evening and there'll be more experienced people than beginners and I know the strengths of the band, I make up a program with what I think is increasing intrinsic difficulty, figure variety, etc, maybe building up to a medley with all figures in it handled earlier in the evening if the organizers like medleys, cruising down to a satisfying low-piece-count strong-flow dance as a finish. (If it's an old-timey band that doesn't phrase strongly - some do - I try to avoid dances that need tight timing; mushy Petronellas are annoying.)

But if it's something where I can't get a good read beforehand on attendance, I have a file of easier contras and a file of harder contras on my tablet computers and while this dance is running I'm flicking through the file and picking the next dance based on my current read of the floor, what figures they know already, what I now think the band can do, etc.

(You could just have twenty dances memorized and have all the bases covered, but I like to have a bunch of different choices for the same niches so that I stay out of the rut of only calling the same twenty dances in front of the same people, since people dance gypsy all over Northern California and you'll see the same ones 150 miles apart.)

As you can guess, I don't have a quantified difficulty scale for dances. I might mark "good opener", and I throw them into the "easier" or "harder" piles. I don't find it worth doing more than that because so much of the perceived difficulty is contextual rathe than intrinsic.

-- Alan

On 4/19/15 10:53 AM, Maia McCormick via Callers wrote:
As I overhaul my contra deck and realize that my difficulty ranking system is super incoherent, and most of my dance rankings are from way before I had any idea what actually makes a dance easy or hard, I've been thinking of scrapping this difficulty ranking system and just starting over. So I was wondering: if you rank your dances by difficulty, what is your system, what are your benchmarks for various difficulty levels, what sorts of things do you consider when determining the difficulty of a dance? If you DON'T rank your dances, why not?

Cheers,

Maia
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