Hi all, I have just come back from a wonderful caller's workshop and have gotten addicted to having other caller's to talk to. So I have two questions for you. First, how do you prepare for an upcoming evening of calling? I am wondering how you prepare AFTER you have selected the dances and programmed the evening.
Good questions. I work continuously on memorizing my repertoire of dances, so, generally, the dances I choose for an evening are already memorized. Any 'new' (that is, unmemorized') dances I memorize after choosing them and before the dance. If I have time I call and 'solo dance' the whole program to music in an empty room. This is both to help drill the dances in my head, and to make sure the succession of dances works well. Sometimes I call all the dances in the car to music while driving to the gig. At the dance itself I review the dance silently in my head after dancers have lined up and before I start the walk through. While the dance is going, once the dancers are on their own, I practice calling (in my head or off mic) the next dance. I memorize new dances by going for walks with an iPod of dance tunes and a list of a few dances I am learning. I drill dances already in my repertoire by periodically going for an iPod walk and the list of dances in my repertoire and calling each of them from memory from just the title. My goal is to see the title of a dance, say Mary Cay's Reel, and to be able to immediately say: 'Becket: circle left three quarters, pass through, allemande left the one you meet . . . ' etc. One of the ways of making this a more pleasant task is to have a good collection of recordings of straight ahead contra dance jigs and reels to practice to. Great Meadow Music (www.greatmeadowmusic.com) has put out some great CD's of straight ahead contra dance music; I would particularly recommend 'Green Mountain' and 'Full Swing'. New England Dancing Masters (that's Andy Davis, Mary Cay Brass, Mary Alice Amidon and me) have put out two great CD's of straight ahead contra dance music: Assembly's 'Other Side of the Tracks' and Andy Davis/Keith Murphy/ Becky Tracy's 'Any Jig or Reel': www.dancingmasters.com Best, Peter Amidon -- Peter Amidon [email protected] 20 Willow Street Brattleboro, VT 05301 802-257-1006 cell: 917-922-5462 http://www.amidonmusic.com http://www.dancingmasters.com
