On Mar 21, 2019, at 12:02 PM, John Sweeney via Callers
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi Seth,
> 1) Larry Jennings has a whole section on this in Give-and-Take.
> Page 42: Effective Lingo.
>
> He suggests that you don’t need any fancy names. Just use
> “Twirl to Swap”. As you do the walk-through you tell the dancers:
> Initial facing
> Final facing
> Which hands are joined
While I hold Larry Jennings in extremely high regard, this is one of the few
topics on which I'd venture to differ with him. I think there are many
situations where the more specific terms will be not only more concise, but
also more effective than "twirl to swap" plus the necessary additional words.
The most case is in extemporaneously-called square dance sequences, but I it
also applies for no-walk-through contra medleys and even for an ordinary contra
dance (with walk-through) if the dance sequence includes more than one kind of
"twirl to swap" action. Of course the more specific terms will only be
effective if dancers are familiar with them, which they won't be if their local
callers avoid those terms as much as possible.
Since John has mentioned _Give-and-Take_, there's something I else I should
mention. In the book, there's a table listing various ways for dancers to swap
places (Box the Gnat, California Twirl, etc.) with info about what hands to use
and which way people turn.
*DO NOT* trust this table!! It is riddled with errors.
Among other things, I suspect that at some point between different drafts of
the book, the column headings for the men's actions and the women's actions got
swapped but the individual entries didn't all get updated accordingly. And I
must presume that this happened at a stage when Larry no longer the energy to
check up on things as thoroughly as he would have in healthier days. Besides
some apparent reversals of men's and women's roles there are some other things
that strike me as incorrect, or at least ambiguous. Unfortunately, I didn't
look at the table carefully enough to notice these points and report them or
seek clarification while Larry was still living.
--Jim
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