Re: [Callers] Festival callers?

Hello folks, Shared-Weight (for which I'm grateful) has been abuzz with birthdays and spawning new lists, but I did want to put out the results of the festival poll I ran a little while ago. It seems more a reflection on self-selection than the fraction of callers that work festivals; I got over a dozen variants of 'I've called festivals' to only a few 'nope, not me'. I also got several side conversations about my motivations for asking and my odd definitions. I'm grateful for the information, and also the discussions it spawned. I personally am looking to move on to the festival circuit eventually, but that wasn't my motivation for asking. I was discussing with a choreographer the likelihood of having a need for a challenging dance. While I don't think festivals need, warrant, or are necessarily good venues for challenging dances; in my mind a caller that was working festivals was much more likely to be in a position at some point where a challenging dance was called for (and be able to teach it well). It's certainly not a one-to-one relationship; but I was trying to estimate numbers, and that's how my mind framed it. I'm now wondering how many active contra dance callers are out there (say, called an evening of dancing in the past year?), but I don't think a shared-weight survey would answer that anyway. I'm guessing somewhere between 100 and 1000 (for an order of magnitude). Thanks again for the information and discussions. Keeps my mind turning. On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 8:24 AM, Luke Donev <luke.donev(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Luke Donev Luke.Donev(a)gmail.com