On Tue, Sep 17, 2013, Greg McKenzie wrote: > > The first three dances of the evening are where I put most of my > programming effort. The goal of this segment of the evening is to build > the confidence of all of the dancers and to minimize the perceived > importance of partnering decisions. This helps to limit any cliquish or > defensive partnering behaviors by the dancers early in the evening. I do > this first by keeping the dance slots as short as possible with little or > no walk-through. For this early segment of the evening I also select ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > dances with excellent neighbor interaction and with minimal partner > interaction.
Going to sound like a broken record, but I think this is a recipe for causing difficulty for hearing-impaired dancers. Experienced as I am, I *hate* no-walkthrough dances. You may recall I've made earlier comments about the clarity and enunciation of the average square dance caller compared with the average contra caller -- the contra caller usually suffers in comparison, even without music. You probably won't even see the effects of this, because anyone who has problems will just quietly leave. That's what the vast majority of hearing-impaired people do. You may in fact be one of the rarer contra callers with excellent enunciation and a killer sound engineer (because it's a lot harder to get good speech over live music), but I think it's really inappropriate for you to encourage no-walkthrough as a general practice. Side note: I've noticed *WAY* more hearing-impaired people square dancing than contra dancing, despite the fact that contra dancing is overall much easier for hearing-impaired people (because you only need to hear the walkthrough until you learn the dance). I wonder why that is.... -- Hugs and backrubs -- I break Rule 6 http://rule6.info/ <*> <*> <*> Help a hearing-impaired person: http://rule6.info/hearing.html
