From Louise Siddons:

Also, specifically in terms of programming (which someone mentioned), there are aspects of calling where experience is a key element of the learning process. Shortcuts will be detrimental to the caller’s experience even if the dancers don’t notice.

From me:

This is much like late Larry Jennings’ decision to transcribe dances in his book, Zesty Contras and Give-and-Take with abbreviations and in a form that was not common in the time. His thinking was people using his books would have to think about the dance they were planning to call had to think about the dance as they re-transcribed it. I recall the challenge of putting dances down on a card (remember those?) (and I know people still use cards…) from Zesty Contras and doing just what Larry intended: thinking a dance through as I put it down in my re-abbreviated cards.

Cheers,

~Erik Hoffman

Oakland CA

From: Louise Siddons via Contra Callers <contracallers@lists.sharedweight.net>
Sent: Sunday, January 12, 2025 12:35 PM
To: Shared Weight Contra Callers <contracallers@lists.sharedweight.net>
Subject: [Callers] Re: Unifying contra dance formats with AI

AI is resource-intensive and an environmental disaster. Using it for trivial purposes feels worse than pointless to me.

In the spirit of slow food, might we not consider ‘slow folk dance’ as taking a positive, sustainable position in relation to the climate crisis? There is no actual need to make anything related to contra dancing more efficient.

(I’m reminded of the joke that dancing is a very complicated way of going nowhere. Surely in some sense we embody the idea that the journey is the destination?)

Louise.

(Winchester, UK)

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