[Callers] Difficulty rankings?

Sun Apr 19 21:15:55 PDT 2015

Some things that I think make dances easy are:

1) Stay within your minor set. Even easy appearing dances that leave 
your minor set add a challenge that is often confusing. It's can (I 
think) be slightly less confusing to do a simple double progression than 
leave and return to a minor set.

2) Use those plain English calls: ones that we understand without having 
to learn a figure: circle left, right-hand turn, swing your partner. 
Lines forward and back. Most people in my neck of the world (Coastal 
California) know Do Si Do...

3) A good story line. Getting into dances somewhat experienced contra 
dancers find easy: A good story line. A dance built in a way that flows 
in a way that fits into our concept of what comes next. This concept is 
a bit more mystical. It's easy to identify these dances: you can stop 
calling. A dance can have a lot of parts, but somehow fit easily into 
our brains and movements.

The things Alan mentions below are all worthy of consideration, too, as 
are Larry Jennings' discussion in /Zesty Contras/, as well as his 
rankings and marks in his transcriptions are worth looking at again, and 
then again.

~erik hoffman
     oakland, ca

On 4/19/2015 1:27 PM, Alan Winston via Callers wrote:
> 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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>
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