On May 18, 2019, at 11:28 AM, Rich Dempsey via Callers <callers@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 base
d 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-crosswalk-and-speeding-double-decker-bus.jpg
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_wrestling-real_estate-industrial-bmm0122_low.jpg
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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