[Callers] Difficulty rankings?

[Alan Winston via Callers]

Maia --

While you can assign a level of difficulty of dances in isolation, it 
doesn't really tell you the whole story.  Whatever intrinsic difficulty 
the dance possesses interacts with what the floor can do right now and 
what the caller can put across. A dance that's easy right after the 
break might have been fatally difficult as an opener.
A floor of relatively fit dancers with some level of experience and no 
hearing impairment can do things easily that others can't do at all.

A caller can make any dance difficult, and a caller can put across an 
intrinsically more difficult dance with clarity, confidence, and precise 
prompting.  So some of that suitability of dance to crowd has to deal 
with the state of the caller.  This makes it hard to write down a rating 
on a card that's going to have meaning when you use it.


So what makes a dance easy, intrinsically?
  - strong flow
  - Low piece count
  - few or no fractions (some people can't hear, don't process, or won't 
do the "and a half" part of 1 and 1/2;
     this is recoverable if the next thing is partner swing but bad news 
if you need to do something else right
     away)
  - no action outside the minor set
  - clear progression
  - symmetry (because if the roles are the same there's less confusion 
at the ends)
  - recovery point(s); moment of poise
  - sticking with your partner
  - straightforward end effects
  - familiar figures or figures that you can get without drill


When I'm calling for a dance society dance where I have a strong 
expectation that there'll be enough people for satisfactory longways 
contras through the whole evening and there'll be more experienced 
people than beginners and I know the strengths of the band, I make up a 
program with what I think is increasing intrinsic difficulty, figure 
variety, etc, maybe building up to a medley with all figures in it 
handled earlier in the evening if the organizers like medleys, cruising 
down to a satisfying low-piece-count strong-flow dance as a finish.  (If 
it's an old-timey band that doesn't phrase strongly - some do - I try to 
avoid dances that need tight timing; mushy Petronellas are annoying.)

But if it's something where I can't get a good read beforehand on 
attendance, I have a file of easier contras and a file of harder contras 
on my tablet computers and while this dance is running I'm flicking 
through the file and picking the next dance based on my current read of 
the floor, what figures they know already, what I now think the band can 
do, etc.

(You could just have twenty dances memorized and have all the bases 
covered, but I like to have a bunch of different choices for the same 
niches so that I stay out of the rut of only calling the same twenty 
dances in front of the same people, since people dance gypsy all over 
Northern California and you'll see the same ones 150 miles apart.)

As you can guess, I don't have a quantified difficulty scale for 
dances.  I might mark "good opener", and I throw them into the "easier" 
or "harder" piles.  I don't find it worth doing more than that because 
so much of the perceived difficulty is contextual rathe than intrinsic.

-- Alan




On 4/19/15 10:53 AM, Maia McCormick via Callers wrote:
> As I overhaul my contra deck and realize that my difficulty ranking 
> system is super incoherent, and most of my dance rankings are from way 
> before I had any idea what actually makes a dance easy or hard, I've 
> been thinking of scrapping this difficulty ranking system and just 
> starting over. So I was wondering: if you rank your dances by 
> difficulty, what is your system, what are your benchmarks for various 
> difficulty levels, what sorts of things do you consider when 
> determining the difficulty of a dance? If you//DON'T rank your dances, 
> why not?
>
> Cheers,
> Maia
>
>
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