Re: [Callers] New Callers Dance in Arlington, MA

Hello everyone! We had our New Callers Dance on Saturday night and it went very well! We had around 25 people show up (which means that we didn't cover our costs 8^( ), but they were all our friends and mostly very experienced dancers. We had one teenager who was relatively new to dancing and one woman for whom this was her second dance. The music by Amy Larkin and Larry Unger was great! They were also very easy to work with. We put out feedback forms and we all got lots of pointers! It was funny watching our resident callers (Lisa G. and Sue Rosen) run back to the table, fill out forms, then jump into the next dance together. 8^) I was not as nervous about getting up in front of people as I thought I was going to be. Most likely because I knew almost everyone in the room and the crowd was much smaller than Pinewoods. My first dance (Forgotten Treasure) went very well. I was nervous about the size of the crowd and whether or not I could do the circle mixer, and I was considering using the backup dance that I brought (The Baby Rose). I asked Seth's advice when he was out at the top of the set, and he wouldn't let me back out of it. 8^) Love and Kisses turns out to be more challenging to call than I thought when I first selected it, with the right and left grand around the circle. I had some problems teaching it, also. I was late telling the men which hand to take with their partner for the wavy ring, and I missed the opportunity to tell them to balance forward and back instead of right and left (which would have felt much better). I was too tentative with my prompting the first couple of times through the dance (and missed some prompts, too), but hit my stride for the next couple. I managed to rattle off the prompting that I worked out on paper and practiced beforehand (much thanks to Bob Golder for helping me with that). I got a couple of feedback forms with the usual circle mixer complaints, but I felt it was important to have the experience of calling one and I'm glad that I took up the challenge of calling a high piece count dance. I also caught some people digging it. 8^) The main criticisms of the last two dances (Carousel and Another Nice Combination) were that I didn't prompt long enough for the dancers to solidify the sequence in memory. I also didn't prompt the transitions that required a little more thought from the dancers long enough. I had one moment in ANC where I accidentally called the Circle Left when the dancers were supposed to Ladies Chain. I realized immediately that something was wrong when half the set did one and half did the other. I immediately called Ladies Chain (late) then continued the sequence on time from there. This is where having so many experienced dancers saved my butt. Their recovery skills meant that they were back on sequence by the end of B2. I called the dance a couple of more times through to cement the correct sequence in their memory and backed out. All in all, I'm happy with how I did. I didn't have any catastrophic errors and the dancers had a great time. It was great to go first. After I finished, I changed into dancing clothes and danced the rest of the afternoon relaxed and carefree! 8^) Some of you know about my next challenge: I'm calling a full evening in East Sandwich (on Cape Cod) on December 18th with Amy and Jonathan Larkin. I have been working on my program, but have a couple of slots that I haven't been able to fill. So I've been looking through Give and Take (Larry Jenning's new book) for dances. I think I have a couple picked out now, and will post my program soon for comment. WoooHooo!!! And away we go! Chris I felt like I did a good job of keeping an eye on the dancers and watching what was going on. Chris Weiler wrote: