29 Jun
2023
29 Jun
'23
4:15 p.m.
The most successful thing we've tried so far, as similarly novice callers
needing to learn new dances for our fledgling monthly Friday evening dance,
is to host workshops on the off-Fridays, specifically to teach and walk
through new dances, work on technique and experiment with new ideas.
Before that we used a chess set to play through patterns of movement.
Working with real people has been significantly better for myriad reasons.
Sometimes there were too few of us to perfectly walk through dances but
that lead to humorous and creative attempts at problem solving with friends
on a Friday evening. All good.
(Hi Harrison!)
Rob
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Robert Matson
On Thu, Jun 29, 2023 at 8:31 AM Harris Lapiroff via Contra Callers <
contracallers(a)lists.sharedweight.net> wrote:
Have you seen already Cary Ravitz’s Micro Robot
Dance?
https://www.dance.ravitz.us/mrd.php
On Thu, Jun 29, 2023, at 9:02 AM, Emily Addison via Contra Callers wrote:
Hi Harrison,
Interesting ideas!
I have found that videos of actual dancers have been suuuuuuper helpful in
figuring out how a dance works. There's a lot of subtle things that become
evident when watching videos that wouldn't show up in simulations (e.g.,
where timing is sight, where people need additional prompting etc).
Callers Box is AMAZING for this as they link to videos of the dance. My
suggestion would be to watch the dance in multiple contexts.
Emily
On Wed, Jun 28, 2023 at 10:34 PM Harrison Keely via Contra Callers <
contracallers(a)lists.sharedweight.net> wrote:
Hi, everyone! As a new caller, I’m looking for apps that will help me
visualize, practice, and plan contra dances.
The pipe dream is an Oculus/Vision Pro VR app allowing callers to practice
calling while virtual dancers follow instructions. VR developers - let's
talk!
More realistically, it would be amazing to have something similar to the
Taminations app (https://www.tamtwirlers.org/taminations/), but for
contra dances instead of squares. The idea is that you could input a
sequence of moves and watch the 2D figures perform them.
http://dancekaleidoscope.org.au/dance.html is the closest option I’ve
found to this, but it offers only specific full dances and doesn’t let you
input individual figures to see them combined. There’s a note on the bottom
of that page which says you can download an HTML/Javascript program to
animate your own dances, but it seems overly complex to set up (I can’t
figure it out on my Mac), and unfriendly for mobile devices.
One last thing – I’m hunting for an iOS app that’s a database of dances.
Like “The Caller’s Box” (
https://www.ibiblio.org/contradance/thecallersbox/) but for iPhone-sized
screens and with offline support.
Perhaps some of these things don’t yet exist, but I think they would go a
long way toward helping new callers. Maybe there are some callers or
contra-lovers out there who double as software developers or know someone
with skills who could help us and we can create new applications together
to boost the next generation of callers.
Any feedback, ideas, or help would be great!
Thank you,
Harrison
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