Thanks Alan, Rich, Mac, and Jim!

>> and have a couple slightly more challenging ones - with progression, etc - up your sleeve but without any emotional investment in actually using them.

"without emotional investment in using them" is very well-put, and I think it describes my philosophy overall for this dance "series" 

>Definitely agree on the "without any emotional investment" part.  Long-term, do you have an ambition for these events to evolve into "contra" dances, or would you be happy as a clam to keep having events where facility at ending a swing side-by-side with the _____ on the left and the _____ on the right is not an important skill, so long as you have a room full of smiling dancers?

I haven't emotionally invested in an outcome :) I don't live there, so I can realistically only hold dances when I visit my parents. I think I'd feel glad if I was able to help sow seeds of an eventual dance community. But since I'm not present to spearhead growth, it seems like the best seed I can sow is "have a room full of smiling dancers every once in a while." Give people good memories of connecting with family and friends through music and dance.



> I have a few comments and questions about your notes:

> The notes say "beginner's lesson (circle, Lark Raven, ...)" but the dance descriptions use "ladles" and "gentlespoons".  What terms did you actually use?  If you used "Larks" and "Ravens", did you say anything at all about their relation to traditional gender roles?  In practice how much correlation was there between what people looked like and which role they danced in?

That's a website feature---if you're logged in, you can choose a dialect to print your program. So you (not logged in) saw gentlespoons, while I logged in to print that program saw Larks & Ravens. When I print a program for Childgrove open calling I print the roles as ladies & gents. https://contradb.com/dialect 

I picked Larks and Ravens for this dance, and introduced them like this:

"ask someone to dance, take their hand, and line up facing the band. Somebody's on the left, lefts are Larks, raise your left hand. The other person's on the right, rights are Ravens, raise your right hand. You can be a lark one dance and a raven the next dance, the roles only matter so you know when I'm talking to you."  

As you notice only 2 dances really "had" roles, but this worked fine, nobody seemed confused, and everybody danced with each other. The 'I can dance with anyone" persisted from the beginners' lesson through the rest of the dance too (you don't name them lark & raven or lady & gent to do Virginia Reel, but you still find a partner. Men and women partnered, women and women partnered, men and men partnered---which seems like the ideal outcome for a twice-a-year dance? Who knows what ratio of people will come in the door---my hope is to have people only have to sit out when they choose to sit out.) 

>Leaving aside the waltz and the polka, it looks like the only two dances where the roles of Lark/Gentlespoon vs. Raven/Ladle were significant were the roll away dance and Mad Scatter.

I didn't say anything but 'find a partner for a waltz / polka' for the couples dances. People did pair off more-or-less by gender for those; a fair number of attendees were married couples.

>Notes on the roll away dance say "succeeded at walkthrough, weren't going to make it through the dance."  If you could tell, did the confusion seem to have to do with figuring out who was in what role, or was it mostly about something else, such as getting from the star to the lines of four?

I think that the difficulty was that there were TWO roles to remember: a person was a head OR a side, AND a raven OR a lark. That was too much intricacy for people who don't know at least one of the roles on autopilot. Lesson learned. 

>[Two side comments on that dance: (1) Notes say "This variation is Wade Pearson's, removing the right-left-through. ...", but the "original" version you link to doesn't have a right and left through.  It has a cross trail.  (2) Personally, I don't think it would be a great loss to drop this dance from the repertoire, regardless of the role terminology or the manner of setting up the lines of four.  I could say more on both points but don't want to go even further off topic.]

Agreed, I really wanted something with a rollaway since it's my favorite move for "teaching giving weight," but it seems to require intricate choreography to get people back to place. I hoped the square would do it, but I overshot the audience. They were gracious when I had us switch, at least :) 

>The other dance description that mentions the roles is Mad Scatter.  How did that work out in practice?  I note that it doesn't really matter which member of each pair goes into the center for an allemande or star and which one orbits, provided nobody minds who they get for new partner.  But I'm curious about what actually happened.

>Notes on Mad Scatter say "Avoid a mixer last even though they voted for it."  Do you have reason to believe that people were disappointed about that?  I certainly know of many dance series where people would bristle at having a mixer as the "last" dance of the evening (even if followed by a waltz as the really last dance), but I'm wondering whether you actually sensed such bristling at your event.  Note also Rich's comment on ending a barn dance with a circle mixer.

This dance itself went smoothly, people retained their roles and knew what to do. People sort of made larger and larger 'blobs' by the end of the tune. I thought I sensed something like stress, though---in a scatter mixer, it seemed like there were moments of "oh we're left out, there's no new partner for us" and so sometimes people would have a disappointed/stressed look on their face while looking for the 'lost and found'. I had a broad age range, and it seemed like people who had lower mobility were more-often the left-out, stressed ones. 

Since those were the first non-smiles I saw all evening, I'd rather avoid it next time, especially as the closing dance. I think a circle mixer would be a great closer for this type of dance though, since you will meet everyone to bid farewell, while always having a 'next partner' close-at-hand. 

Thanks for asking! I hope I've answered the spirit of all your questions---if I've missed anything let me know,

Allison
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