12 May
2025
12 May
'25
1:19 p.m.
On 11 May 2025, at 11:58, Jeff Kaufman via Contra Callers
<contracallers(a)lists.sharedweight.net> wrote:
. My guess is that a reversed petronella, swing, or contra corners would similarly throw
people, and so would a ladies/robins left-hand chain.
Interestingly enough I just did this with a mixed group at Contra Camp (our boutique
contra weekend at Halsway Manor, in Somerset): as part of a “contra games” workshop we
danced Tica Tica Timing anticlockwise. This reversed the rotation of everything in the
dance, including the swing, the petronellas (which became retronellas), the promenade
(passing right shoulder), and the chain (by the left). By far the hardest thing for
dancers was the anticlockwise swing, and the entire exercise was unsurprisingly harder for
experienced dancers than new ones. The flow of the choreography helped override their
clockwise muscle memory, though, and we had done a chain workshop earlier in the day that
had reasonably thoroughly introduced both left- and right-hand chains, so that aspect of
the altered dance was probably more familiar than the rest of it!
Some years ago (pre-pandemic), I wrote the dance The Reminder to help dancers learn a
left-hand chain — because for those traveling across the set, a chain has the same pattern
as a hey, although no caller has ever explicitly pointed this out to me. But it’s really
important to call attention to the weaving aspect of a chain: new dancers being introduced
to both right- and left-hand chains can sometimes suffer from teaching that describes the
hand across as a “pull by” when in fact it’s a hand turn halfway. If one teaches it as a
half turn, the dancers are facing in the correct direction for the courtesy turn — making
it easier for the anchor dancers to step into the courtesy turn on the correct side of and
in the correct rotation with the traveling dancers. If dancers think they are doing a
pull-by, they head directly for their corner’s place and are going in completely the wrong
direction for the courtesy turn.
It can also help to teach the anchor dancers to shift into the traveler’s place beside
them as it’s vacated — another detail that often gets omitted by callers, who expect
dancers to learn this through experience (and indeed some aspects of contra are better
learned through doing than teaching, although I believe it’s worth mentioning this point
periodically in case people are at a place in their learning journey where they’re ready
to hear it).
Contra Camp is enthusiastically gender-free and called positionally; with all the dancers
dancing both roles, it’s impossible (and meaningless) to make a distinction between a
robins’ and a larks’ left-hand chain — so our experience didn’t shed any light on that
aspect of Jeff’s comment.
Louise
(Winchester, UK)