28 Sep
2013
28 Sep
'13
11:50 a.m.
On Tue, Sep 17, 2013, Greg McKenzie wrote:
The first three dances of the evening are where I put most of my
programming effort. The goal of this segment of the evening is to build
the confidence of all of the dancers and to minimize the perceived
importance of partnering decisions. This helps to limit any cliquish or
defensive partnering behaviors by the dancers early in the evening. I do
this first by keeping the dance slots as short as possible with little or
no walk-through. For this early segment of the evening I also select
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
dances with excellent neighbor interaction and with
minimal partner
interaction.
Going to sound like a broken record, but I think this is a recipe for
causing difficulty for hearing-impaired dancers. Experienced as I am, I
*hate* no-walkthrough dances. You may recall I've made earlier comments
about the clarity and enunciation of the average square dance caller
compared with the average contra caller -- the contra caller usually
suffers in comparison, even without music.
You probably won't even see the effects of this, because anyone who has
problems will just quietly leave. That's what the vast majority of
hearing-impaired people do.
You may in fact be one of the rarer contra callers with excellent
enunciation and a killer sound engineer (because it's a lot harder to get
good speech over live music), but I think it's really inappropriate for
you to encourage no-walkthrough as a general practice.
Side note: I've noticed *WAY* more hearing-impaired people square dancing
than contra dancing, despite the fact that contra dancing is overall much
easier for hearing-impaired people (because you only need to hear the
walkthrough until you learn the dance). I wonder why that is....
--
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