---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Winston, Alan P." 

"Purely for callers dealing with the situation once it's happened already: I don't know if advanced contras are meant to be difficult/spatially-challenging etc contras.  You could in general try to accommodate.a mixed level floor by trading complexity for novelty.  Unusual figures equalize things for everybody (if nobody's used to a left-hand chain the beginners are at no disadvantage)."

My belief, which, I think, might differ from Alan's, is that "advanced" dancers -- let's define that as those fluent (i.e. able to successfully and happily enjoy a hash call) in a substantive set of glossary figures -- will have, by osmosis, unavoidably developed a degree of "dance thinking", musicality and spacial awareness. That includes an awareness of "the space between" figures; i.e. the transitions. 

So, I think that an advanced dancer does, in fact, have a leg up when faced with a novelty figure, or anything new in the dance; they can and will use their experience to help figure it out. (Unless, I guess, the novelty figure is so far removed from anything previously encountered; "if Einstein were a contradance choreographer and brought along a "quantum figure", for example. Egads!)

Also, novelty, in my experience, can be hit-and-miss. From unexpected bliss to eye-rolling hokiness.

To my mind, "dance thinking" somewhat analogous to "design thinking"; that is, a way of thinking that guides the experienced practitioner in whatever context the designer practices the craft.

From Alan's paragraph, therefore, I might change the suggestion of "trading complexity for novelty" to "trading complexity of figures for satisfying, perhaps novel, combinations".

Don't know if that's a useful observation.

I'm, otherwise, totally on-board with Alan's appreciation of a dance session in which high levels of skill and trust are so concentrated (i.e. ratio of adepts to novices) that magic can happen.

Three examples from my experience.

1. An advanced dance weekend I attended, repeatedly, years ago which had a "word of mouth, invite your skilled dance friends", form of recruitment. The caller(s) knew the crowd could navigate through any hash thrown at them in an hour-long marathon medley. (Yes, it's exclusionary. So is El Capitan for climbers. Or uni courses with prerequisites.)

2. The Flurry Festival in upstate New York. The synchronicity of 1000-ish dancers, invariably including some novices, successfully flowing through moderately challenging contras is a marvel and a delight.

3. Similarly wonderful, though not quite as large -- due to space limitations -- is the contra pavilion (Warren's Roadhouse!) at Seattle's Folklife festival which, like the Flurry, would see a modicum of novice dancers successfully assimilated into the Borg.

In dance,

Ken Panton