I think it’s probably the more experienced dancers that have trouble initially with a CCW progression. Most new dancers just go where the dance puts them, and they don’t think about it too much otherwise.
That said, many leftward progressions are just “slide left, circle” or “circle 3/4, pass through” and I would agree that makes those dances easier, but the fact that they progress CW is just a correlation.
In my opinion, one common thing that makes CCW dances harder to understand for dancers is callers who have everyone circle *right* one place to get set up at the beginning. If you had a backward-progressing improper dance, would you swap the 1s and 2s before the walkthrough?
Sleepy rants and rambles, Isaac B On Sep 11, 2024, at 9:05 PM, David Harding via Contra Callers <[email protected]> wrote:
A minor point looking to the future: Most Beckett
dances have a clockwise progression, not counterclockwise. I
would suggest getting your community accustomed to the clockwise
direction of progression. As you start to draw from the canon
of dances, you will have far more to choose from with that
progression. And the ones that go counterclockwise tend, I
think, to be more challenging. Often the instructions lining up
are, starting with duple minor configuration, "Take hands four
from the top and circle left one place into Beckett formation."
This builds in a little muscle memory of the progression
direction and puts the ones moving down the hall.
Dave Harding
Dancing in the Chicago area and across the Midwest
On 9/11/2024 10:30 AM, Katherine
Kitching via Contra Callers wrote:
Hi all-
here in Halifax, to keep things simple for our
beginner-full/generally unskilled group, we never dance in
Becket formation these days.
But Luke's
original post has suddenly got me "seeing the light" about how I
could use simple beckets as a way to get beginner people dancing
in contra lines without worrying about the complexities of
ejection and getting ppl to remember to change places when
ejected. (And also avoiding the strange feeling of how the
dance symmetry changes when you switch from moving up the hall
to down the hall or vice versa).
So I'm
going to test it out with my group...
But I
realize it's been a while since I danced a Becket and I forget
some of the basic mechanics.
I just
tried googling but could not easily find the info I was looking
for...
so--
apologies for asking such a basic question here-- but I trust it
will be an efficient way to find an answer :)
First off
just a bit of info on my plan--
, I plan
for now to try out only very simple Beckets where everyone comes
back to their home place after every figure.
So i'll be
explaining the progression as sliding CCW (I'm gonna go with CCW
progression only, for now) 2 places, until you are in a new
duple.
(we may
play on simple variations of this like going forward in lines
towards the old couple, and veering backwards towards the new
couple as in the first dance Luke presented here).
I
understand that if there is an odd number of couples, then every
time the dance runs through, a couple will be ejected, either at
the top or the bottom.
My question
is-- if there is an EVEN number of couples, then are two couples
ejected, top and bottom, every second time??
Or, does
the progression just involve a big fast turn for the people at
the top and bottom of the giant oval, so that they always meet a
new couple, every single time?
thanks all
for your help :)
Kat k
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