Re: [Callers] practice vs. preparation (Alan Winston)

aware of it being done for contra dances at all. For English, several of the dances have email lists for people interested in that series and programs are posted after the fact. One person - Mary Luckhardt - maintains cumulative spreadsheets of dances called for all the series. I also collect that information from the posted programs and keep my own lists. This is important in English for a couple of reasons: There's a core set of dances that we agreed some years back we'd like to have done at least annually at our regular dances, so that we can maintain some kind of common repertoire in the face of the explosion of new and newly-reconstructed dances. We like to visit the dances that are on the Playford Ball program (different each year) so that people don't come to them cold, so it helps to know which ones have been done. And we don't like to repeat dances from week to week unintentionally. In English, a repeat is really a repeat - same figures, same tune, only one tune per dance. (And in venues like Palo Alto English, with a house band that's mostly the same from session to session, that tune is likely to sound very much the same each night it's played.)