On Mar 21, 2019, at 12:02 PM, John Sweeney via Callers
<callers(a)lists.sharedweight.net> wrote:
Hi Seth,
1) Larry Jennings has a whole section on this in Give-and-Take. Page 42:
Effective Lingo.
He suggests that you don’t need any fancy names. Just use “Twirl to Swap”.
As you do the walk-through you tell the dancers:
Initial facing
Final facing
Which hands are joined
While I hold Larry Jennings in extremely high regard, this is one of the few topics on
which I'd venture to differ with him. I think there are many situations where the
more specific terms will be not only more concise, but also more effective than
"twirl to swap" plus the necessary additional words. The most case is in
extemporaneously-called square dance sequences, but I it also applies for no-walk-through
contra medleys and even for an ordinary contra dance (with walk-through) if the dance
sequence includes more than one kind of "twirl to swap" action. Of course the
more specific terms will only be effective if dancers are familiar with them, which they
won't be if their local callers avoid those terms as much as possible.
Since John has mentioned _Give-and-Take_, there's something I else I should mention.
In the book, there's a table listing various ways for dancers to swap places (Box the
Gnat, California Twirl, etc.) with info about what hands to use and which way people
turn.
*DO NOT* trust this table!! It is riddled with errors.
Among other things, I suspect that at some point between different drafts of the book, the
column headings for the men's actions and the women's actions got swapped but the
individual entries didn't all get updated accordingly. And I must presume that this
happened at a stage when Larry no longer the energy to check up on things as thoroughly as
he would have in healthier days. Besides some apparent reversals of men's and
women's roles there are some other things that strike me as incorrect, or at least
ambiguous. Unfortunately, I didn't look at the table carefully enough to notice these
points and report them or seek clarification while Larry was still living.
--Jim