I haven’t looked in detail at your (Jeremy’s) post, but quite a few of the “who goes first” questions are answered with “first diagonals” or “second diagonals”—which would be new terminology for folks who haven’t done English country dancing, but it’s pretty easy to learn. I agree that ending the swing, though, is difficult to easily describe by position.

There was a contra dance in the States 1981-89 that used calling based on position, “Les be Gay and Dance,” in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I believe Carol Ormand was quite involved with that dance, but I don’t think she’s on this list. (You’ll find references to that dance online that say that style of calling in contra ended up being unsustainable, but as far as I can tell all of that traces back to one article, and that article doesn’t give its sources.)

I wrote the lcfd.org piece on GF English calling; The Heather and the Rose http://heatherandrose.org/terms.shtml is another place to look. (This has been called “global terminology” for quite a long time.)


Read Weaver
Jamaica Plain, MA
http://lcfd.org

On Jul 6, 2017, at 11:27 AM, Mark Hillegonds via Callers <callers@lists.sharedweight.net> wrote:

Hi, Jeremy,

The Lavender Country and Folk Dancers (LCFD) use some positional references in their gender-free English Country Dances. Might want to check it out:  http://lcfd.org/gf-ecd-calling-conventions.html

Looking forward to hearing more about this as others respond. 


On Thu, Jul 6, 2017 at 10:30 AM, Jeremy Child via Callers <callers@lists.sharedweight.net> wrote:
Hi Everyone

In the past there has been a lot of discussion on this group about gender free calling, and in particular about the terms used for the two roles.

This got me thinking as to whether it would be possible to eliminate the use of role names and call using just positional references.

Some significant thought later, I came up with a system that I believe could, in theory, work.  This is largely an intellectual exercise rather than a serious suggestion, but I would appreciate any comments / feedback / thoughts / ideas you have.


(There is a link to another document I have written about gender free calling - this is primarily aimed at English Barn Dance / Ceilidh calling.)

Jeremy




--
Mark Hillegonds

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Email:  mark.hillegonds@gmail.com