Alan (and all),

I’m a relatively new dancer (only dancing 4 years or so ) so I remember what it was like to be new: Partly because moves are taught from a stand-still in the walk thru (thus causing me to not notice direction of flow) and partly because as a beginner I was overwhelmed with too many things to pay attention to, I seldom noticed issues of flow for the first several months of dancing. I thought of the dances as long strings of discrete moves. 

What was helpful to me to begin to feel/notice flow were comments from the caller during the walk-thru that primed me to pay attention to flow: things like “when we dance this to music, you’ll notice that your momentum from the ___ move carries you right into the ___ move, so you naturally know which direction to move." But without someone pointing that out, I might have counted myself lucky that I didn’t have to jerk to a stop and move in another direction, but it would not have occurred to me that the writer of the dance was deliberately engineering a pleasing flow.

So I’d recommend just pointing out those lovely moments as you’re teaching the walk-thru, so that folks (when not overwhelmed by too much information) can begin to feel the natural direction of the moves. 

I am still new enough to remember the dawning awareness (more than once) when another dancer said “this dance has a lovely flow” and I thought, “Really? Let me pay attention... [then we danced one more time thru] Oh, why, yes, it does!” 

If you are a kinaesthetic person, it might seem bizarre to think anyone would learn to dance cerebrally. But (as a psychology professor) my cerebral skills are my best asset, and so when learning any new skill that is what I naturally use. You have to cue me to think about listening to the flow of my body before it will occur to me to pay attention to that, even when dancing!

Becky

On Sep 29, 2019, at 3:37 PM, Winston, Alan P. via Callers <callers@lists.sharedweight.net> wrote:

Tom --

It's possible, if not likely, that what I'm calling "seems to have no sense of flow" has different causes for different people at different times.  I've definitely seen it happening at gents/ladies dances as well as at larks/robins dances as well as at English dances.  When I lead a beginner session at a larks/robins dance I introduce role names when teaching the swing, emphasize that larks open on the left, ravens/robins on the right, and do a circle mixer that's just into the center and back, swing the next etc, repeating the larks left robins right thing.  So they get to hear the role name a lot.

Of course new comers often take quite a while to get sorted regardless.  Last Sunday I called a single contra dance at a party - the party honored a queer activist who also liked contra dancing, so the honoree wanted there to be a dance, although hardly anybody at the party had done it before.  Did a Haste-to-the-Wedding variant which only had a partner swing, felt no need to use any role names at all (beyond partner and neighbor)  and every foursome one couple was in spent about 6 of the 8 beats available to do a right hand star getting the star organized.  I couldn't see what was going on, but they'd pass through and circle on time, and then their foursome would be huddled like the Peanuts kids around the sad little tree in the Christmas special and then a star would start moving.

(This isn't an example of a "no sense of flow" problem, and I didn't see any of that at that event.)

What I'm talking about here is that there's choreography that seems fairly inevitable - if you're going to circle left into a half-poussette isn't the probable direction of the half-poussette pretty obvious, or if you did a clockwise half poussette into a mad robin why should you even have to use a role name to say who goes through the middle first?  Getting it wrong requires fighting your momentum - and some people will do that.  [Although if they're generally tentative, or late, or executing one call and stopping and then executing the next call, then they don't have appropriate momentum anyway.]

-- Alan


From: Callers <callers-bounces@lists.sharedweight.net> on behalf of tom hinds via Callers <callers@lists.sharedweight.net>
Sent: Sunday, September 29, 2019 5:44 AM
To: callers@lists.sharedweight.net <callers@lists.sharedweight.net>
Subject: [Callers] What can you do.....?
 
Alan,

You raise an interesting question.  After I’ve had time to sleep on it, I’ve come up with some other issues to raise and.discuss.

I’m curious if you have a beginning workshop before the dance.

In my opinion the skills needed for a new dancer to not only survive their first dance but to actually enjoy it are many   And that means having a beginning session that approximates as close as possible the dance itself.  

In your email you mention larks and ravens.  If you do have a beginning workshop, are the newbies given the opportunity to practice/react to their new titles?   Not having that opportunity to practice reacting to their new titles may cause a bit of confusion on the dance floor.

Tom


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