Re: [Callers] Mentorship for Choreographers

I've said this before, but this may be a good thread on which to repeat it. One of the unexpected delights of our Calling Parties, set up to give us a place to call dances in private before we call them in public, to find out where the trouble spots might be, has been the development of dance writers. And not just our dance writers. A select group of people from around the country send us dances, and we try them out at our Calling Parties, take videos of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and send them back to the choreographer, who can tell where and why we went wrong, and whether we enjoyed it, both of which we often do. Voila! Instant mentorship, straight from the sorts of people who will be doing the dances, namely, dancers. You could do the same thing. Buy a camera (ours is a Zoom, since we first wanted a pretty good sound recorder) and a gorillapod/tripod and invite over some people, call your dance and see where it needs to go back to the drawing board. I've seen some dances go through ten or more revisions over several months - but in the end, they turned into a dance for the ages. If you do this, you will never have to waste dancers' time at a regular dance with something that just doesn't work. Or, if it does work, but just needs better calling, you'll have a place to make that happen, too. Start having Calling Parties! M E On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 8:35 PM, Mark Hillegonds <mhillegonds(a)comcast.net>wrote;wrote: -- As you set out for Ithaka, pray that your journey be long, full of adventure, full of discovery... May there be many summer mornings when, with what pleasure, with what joy, you enter harbors you're seeing for the first time. ~Constantine Cavafy, "Ithaka" 1911