13 Feb
2014
13 Feb
'14
2:01 p.m.
On Wed, Feb 12, 2014, Alan Winston wrote:
On 2/12/2014 10:54 PM, Aahz Maruch wrote:
Yuck. ;-) And I'm speaking with my contra dancer hat.
On Wed, Feb 12, 2014, Greg McKenzie wrote:
Aahz, when Greg says "callers at open public contra dances" he really,
really means it. The MWSD world is almost the opposite of what he's
talking about. I:f you can figure that anyone at your dance has been
to classes and knows figures, you can do a lot differently.
Greg's idea is that at OPCD, anybody can walk through the door,
receive no lesson from a caller, and be swept up by the experienced
dancers (eg, anyone who's ever done it before); the caller needs to
avoid it making it unattractive for experienced dancers to dance with
newcomers (eg, running dances a shorter time so that experienced
dancers will know they're not making a huge time commitment if they
dance with a newcomer), conveying the dance with effective word order
and perfect timing, and pretty much not teaching anything, leaving
that up to the experienced dancers.
Well-structured calling is not easy. It does however make a subtle but
significant difference in how confident the dancers feel--particularly at
open, public social events. That is why I structure my calls carefully and
write the calls out verbatim on my cards. That is also why I advocate for
callers at open public contra dances to use dance cards when calling.
Making up calls on the fly often puts the onus on the dancers to get the
timing right.
While I don't particularly disagree with you, particularly for me at this
stage in my calling career, I do find it interesting that your advice to
avoid making up calls on the fly is almost universally ignored by MWSD
callers -- and with the majority of square dance callers (which is to
say, almost all the good ones), it's not the dancers who face the onus of
getting the timing right. MWSD caller responsibility: Call an entertaining
program at whatever
level the dance is advertised to be that works for the people there.
OPCD caller responsibility: Integrate the floor as much as possible
and stay out of the way of the teaching that's happening on the
floor.
(Greg, is that fair?)
Assuming that it is fair, my point still stands, particularly given the
need for experienced dancers with Greg's approach. I've been to square
dances classes as an "angel" (experienced dancer to seed the crowd, which
is a standard component of square dance classes), and a good square dance
teacher is still going to be doing singing calls on the fly, with proper
timing, adjusting to the class that they have, relying on the angels for
a lot of the instruction/guidance.
I also wonder to what extent this has any relationship to the fact that
square dance callers are statistically considerably better than contra
callers at enunciating. That is, with my hearing impairment (deaf with
cochlear implant), I often hear square dance callers better over the
music than I do contra callers without music during the walkthrough.
(I'm entirely amenable to the possibility that the sound system has
something to do with this, but it's something I have noticed across a
large number of different halls and callers, so if the sound system has
significant effect, it's something that is "standard" for contra sound
setup.)
All of which is a roundabout way of wondering what we as contra callers
can learn from square dance callers.
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