Well, I've danced to a caller who decided that the exact same program, with the exact same memorized patter, would work in the same city if separated by a week and in a different venue. Not so much.
-Amy On Wed, Mar 7, 2018, 11:15 PM Yoyo Zhou via Callers < [email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Mar 6, 2018 at 5:41 PM, Kalia Kliban via Callers < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> Dance logs, a cumulative record for a series of which dances have been >> called on any given evening, are very common in the English dance community >> but vanishingly rare in the contra community. Why is that? They're really >> helpful for incoming callers, and it's probably nice for the dancers not to >> keep getting the same dances week after week. >> > > Another factor is that English dances usually specify the tune that goes > with them. Contra dances very rarely do. So if a dance series has a house > band that plays most of the time, as some of the Bay Area English dances > do, then a repeated English dance may be the same figures done to the same > tune played by the same musicians. For a contra, even if the same band > played the same set of tunes, it's typical to change tunes partway through > the dance, anyway, so it's hard to achieve the same degree of repetition. > > Of course, repetition isn't always looked down upon. I've heard that the > weekly dance in Nelson, NH always has Chorus Jig on the program, and other > dances that repeat week to week. Some contra dancers do appreciate > recognizing dances - ah, Poetry in Motion, I know how that one goes. > > As Mac says, the type of repetition that contra dancers really notice is > within an evening - when four dances in a row have heys, or half of the > dances have Petronella turns, and all start to feel the same... and that's > a type of repetition that's less likely to appear in ECD, where dances that > have similar figures could easily be done to different tempos or meters. > > Personally, I keep track of all the dances that I've actually called, > because I don't want to call the same dances all the time; most of the time > it's slightly different from what I programmed originally. I add notes to > myself if something didn't go well. I can't remember if I've been asked by > organizers for my program, but it may have happened once or twice. > > Hope this helps! > > Yoyo Zhou > > _______________________________________________ > List Name: Callers mailing list > List Address: [email protected] > Archives: https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ >
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