8 Jul
2019
8 Jul
'19
3:30 p.m.
On May 18, 2019, at 11:28 AM, Rich Dempsey via Callers
<callers(a)lists.sharedweight.net> wrote, regarding flat-hand allemanders:
... I still don't understand what those people
are thinking.
The question of "what those people are thinking" often comes to my mind in
relation to dance style points in general. A caller (whether myself or someone else)
describes something in terms that seem crystal clear; the thing they are suggesting is
something simple (e.g., "straight wrist, bent fingers", as contrasted to, say, a
complicated choreographic pattern or a long footwork sequence in 11/8 time); perhaps they
even do a demonstration and specifically call dancers' attention to the details they
mean to demonstrate ("Notice how my fingers ..."); and yet, once the music
starts, a large number of dancers do something different from what the caller suggested.
What on earth are all those people thinking?
When a caller's attempt to put something across to a group of dancers isn't very
successful, it seems to me that figuring out *why* can be an important first step toward
coming up with a better approach to teaching that thing in the future--or toward having
better judgment in the future about whether or not to attempt to teach that particular
thing (whether it's a styling nuance, an unfamiliar figure, a complete dance
sequence, or whatever) in any particular situation.
So I'd like to get your thoughts about figuring out what's going on when a
caller's attempt to teach a style point fall flat. What sorts of things do you think
the nonconforming dancers might be thinking? How do you try to judge what the most
significant issues are in any particular case, so that you can decide what to do
differently next time? (I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be productive to go around
cornering different dancers and saying, "Hey, <name>, I noticed that in that
dance where I made a big point of teaching people to do such-and-such, you kept doing
so-and-so. What's up with that?") Can you offer any specific stories about how
you diagnosed a difficulty in putting across a particular style point (whether about
allemandes or anything else) and how you improved your presentation later?
For anyone who feels like wading through more of my musings, below are some possible
reasons I've thought of that dancers might not follow a caller's styling advice.
Some of them may overlap or interact with others, and perhaps some of you can think of
other important possibilities that I've omitted. I don't have any great ideas to
offer about how to judge which of the possibilities listed below apply in any particular
situation. I welcome your comments.
--Jim
1. *Intentional rebellion*: Some dancers may get the vibe that "the caller is
criticizing us" or "the caller thinks (s)he knows our idea of fun better than we
do." They may find this presumption on the part of the caller extremely off-putting
and may decide to show the pompous twit who's boss by visibly disobeying. [While it
may be tempting to assume intentional rebellion as the explanation when you see dancers
apparently making no effort to follow a very clearly explained suggestion from the caller,
I think that such instances of outright contrariness are actually quite rare.]
2. *Informed dissent*: The dancers in question really, truly understand the styling the
caller is recommending and have really, truly given it a fair try--perhaps more than once,
and with a variety of different partners and/or neighbors at one or more previous dance
events--but have concluded that they personally prefer a different styling from what the
caller is suggesting. Furthermore, they have judged, after due consideration, that they
will not impose awkwardness or discomfort on other dancers by using their own preferred
styling. [I certainly must grant respect to the preferences of dancers in this
category--and most especially so when they have some frailty or injury that would make it
painful to dance in the style recommended by the caller. However, there are times when
informed dissent strikes me as an unlikely explanation for dancer behavior. In
particular, it seems unlikely to me that most of the dancers who allemande with flat
hands, straight fingers, and sharply bent wrists can really have given a fair try to the
styling with gently curled fingers and straight wrists and found it wanting. Of course I
haven't lived in all those people's bodies.]
3. *Genuine ambiguity*: The caller's words may have been ambiguous, and some dancers
may have followed an interpretation that never occurred to the caller but that is just as
plausible as the one that the caller intended. [This situation can occur not only for
style suggestions, but also in cases involving the basic choreography of a dance. To give
just one of many, many possible examples, a caller who identifies the role of "first
corner" in Contra Corners as "the person to the right of your partner" may
think the meaning is obvious, but a new dancer could quite plausibly interpret "the
person to the right of your partner" to mean "the person adjacent to your
partner's right shoulder".]
4. *Weak attention, but with good intention*: Some dancers might genuinely believe that
they are being completely cooperative with the caller when in fact they have not paid
careful attention to hearing and interpreting the caller's words. For example, when
some experienced dancers hear a caller start to go into details of styling for some
figure, they might assume that the caller is addressing only newer dancers and that they
themselves already know how to do whatever it is. So they may turn their attention to
modeling (their idea of) standard styling with the new dancers around them and meanwhile
not fully attend to the actual words coming over the P.A. system. [It's easy to
dismiss such dancers with expressions like "smug" or "overconfident"
or "dancers who imagine themselves to be 'experienced'", but I think we
humans have a natural tendency to be only as attentive as we imagine circumstances to
warrant. And our idea of how much attentiveness a situation warrants may be based more on
habit than on careful intellectual consideration. Numerous street crossings in London are
painted with the words "LOOK RIGHT" just off the curb (or "LOOK LEFT"
just off center islands of divided streets) as shown in these photos:
https://image1.masterfile.com/getImage/600-08639271em-look-right-sign-at-cr…
https://www.flickr.com/photos/tracyg/4523412014
http://www.packingmysuitcase.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/lookleft.jpg
That's for the benefit of tourists who genuinely imagine that we're in the habit
of looking both ways before crossing a street, when our actual habit may be to look in the
direction that we normally expect traffic to come from and then to take a few steps into
the street before we look the other way. If people can be less than hyper-vigilant in
situations where it can literally be a matter of life and death, it's hardly
surprising that we can tune out a little when we imagine that a dance caller is about to
go over familiar ground. By the way, notice the arrows in the photos cited above.
Perhaps those are primarily for the benefit of non-English-speaking tourists, but I also
think they're a useful addition to the words even for literate native speakers of
English.]
5. *Verbal/spatial processing issues*: Some dancers may find it more difficult than
others to make sense of a caller's verbal description of a spatial situation. [As an
example, a pair of dancers might have their hands in an allemande hold where the tips of
each dancer's fingers are near the other dancer's index finger, approximately as
shown in the supposed depiction of arm wrestling at
http://lowres.cartoonstock.com/property-supply_and_demand-demand-arm_wrestl…
and when the caller says something about each dancer curving their fingers around the
other dancer's hand "between the base of the thumb and the wrist", they may
simply not make sense of what that could mean. Similarly, to give an example involving
basic choreography rather than styling, when a caller talks about one person in a courtesy
turn backing up while the other goes forward, the person who is told to "back
up" may be unable to imagine what that could mean except to back completely away from
the other dancer. And if the caller tries to clarify by talking about a "common axis
of rotation" or some such thing, it might be like expecting someone who has never
seen the inside of a jet engine, or the outside of kangaroo, to make a recognizable
drawing of one based on a verbal description.]
6. *Mental overload and reversion to habit*: Some dancers may need to devote so much of
their attention to the basic choreography of the dance that they don't have any left
over for details of styling, which therefore revert to the habitual. [I've sometimes
danced with new dancer partners who have had a tendency to press their thumb against the
back of my hand, for example during circles. When an opportunity presents--say, while
we're waiting out at the top or the bottom of the set--I might tell/show them about
how pressing with the thumb is unnecessary, and a bit painful. The result is sometimes
that they keep the thumb out of play for a round or two of the dance but soon go back to
pressing it against the back of my hand. I presume that their attention is all taken up
dealing with things like what to do next and who to do it with and the unfamiliarity of
things being turned around 180 degrees now that we've come back in after being out at
the end, and the thing about what (not) to do with their thumbs is what ends of getting
dropped.]
7. *Acoustic issues*: Perhaps the caller chose excellent words to explain a particular
style point but some combination of acoustic issues rendered the callers words
unintelligible to some of the dancers. [Issues could include poor room acoustics, poor
adjustment of the P.A. system, noise from fans and/or from conversations on the sidelines,
poor enunciation, or poor mic technique. There could also be dancers who have various
degrees of hearing deficits. Acoustic difficulties can interact with issuers attention
(item 4 above) and verbal processing (item 5). One source of distracting noise can be
other dancers who begin talking among themselves as soon as they detect that the caller
has stopped teaching the essentials of the dance sequence and begun to prattle about
styling.]
8. *Unseen demo*: During a demonstration, people might have crowded around so that only
the nearest ones had ha clear view.
9-?. *???*: What possibilities have I missed?
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