Re: Origins of Calling

Well, there does seem to be more than one way to teach a dance. (No idea which was preferred in the past) The way most 'English' clubs and ceilidh clubs do it - a walk through and a prompt The way a Scottish dance club I went to for a brief time does it - walk it (from every position if the dancers were unsure) then no prompting The way a modern American Squares club I went to did it - no walk through, but you are only allowed to dance those dances containing 'calls' you've learnt in class (Basic, Mainstream, Plus). So in the classes the new calls were walked through, but not the dances. All a matter of preference, I thought the Scottish club would have got on a lot faster with a little bit of calling, but some callers call for too long and dancers can get lazy. No walk through can be exciting if you are tuned to a callers voice - a new caller or bad sound system delays the processing of instructions. Mo Waddington ----- Original Message ----- From: jim saxe jim.saxe(a)gmail.com [trad-dance-callers] To: trad-dance-callers(a)yahoogroups.com Sent: Tuesday, August 15, 2017 10:34 PM Subject: Re: [trad-dance-callers] Origins of Calling This may be a "stupid question" but I'm wondering ... Back in the day when young gentlemen and ladies were supposed to learn how to dance quadrilles, cotillions, etc. under the tutelage of a dancing master, perhaps in gender-segregated classes, before essaying to dance them at a ball, what went on--or what do dance historians who have attempted to study the matter imagine went on--during those classes in the dancing masters' salons? While students were practicing to music (whether played by the dancing master or by someone else), did a dancing master ever call out reminders about what figure or what bit of footwork the dancers were supposed to execute next? Or do scholars believe that such real-time prompting was never, ever done--not because it would have been considered coarse, as it would have been at an actual ball, but for some other reason? Perhaps the idea of shouting out what to do next simply never crossed any dancing master's mind. Or perhaps if such an idea began to intrude on a dancing master's mind, it would have been instantly rejected in favor of letting the students rely on their own memories. (I have read somewhere of cultures where children are expected to learn various crafts simply by spending much time sitting at the side of adult practitioners and watching--without asking questions or receiving direct verbal instruction--until they have absorbed enough to take up the tasks themselves. In this way, it is apparently held, children are trained to be good observers.) The same question applies equally to dancing masters in the time of Playford (17th century) or in the time of "Arbeau" (16th century): In the privacy of the classroom, did they ever prompt their students through the figures or steps of dances while music was playing? Ditto for the leaders of classical ballet troupes or other performing dance groups. Did they ever give verbal prompts during early rehearsals, even if they expected the dancers to have the routines fully memorized before performing for an audience? In short, when people here ask about the "origins" of calling, is anyone actually asking about the very *first* uses of real-time verbal prompting of dance figures? Or is the real topic when and how it became socially acceptable to have someone perform such prompting at a social event, after it had already been common in the classroom/rehearsal setting from time immemorial? --Jim