On 11 May 2025, at 11:58, Jeff Kaufman via Contra Callers <[email protected]> wrote: > > . My guess is that a reversed petronella, swing, or contra corners would > similarly throw people, and so would a ladies/robins left-hand chain.
Interestingly enough I just did this with a mixed group at Contra Camp (our boutique contra weekend at Halsway Manor, in Somerset): as part of a “contra games” workshop we danced Tica Tica Timing anticlockwise. This reversed the rotation of everything in the dance, including the swing, the petronellas (which became retronellas), the promenade (passing right shoulder), and the chain (by the left). By far the hardest thing for dancers was the anticlockwise swing, and the entire exercise was unsurprisingly harder for experienced dancers than new ones. The flow of the choreography helped override their clockwise muscle memory, though, and we had done a chain workshop earlier in the day that had reasonably thoroughly introduced both left- and right-hand chains, so that aspect of the altered dance was probably more familiar than the rest of it! Some years ago (pre-pandemic), I wrote the dance The Reminder to help dancers learn a left-hand chain — because for those traveling across the set, a chain has the same pattern as a hey, although no caller has ever explicitly pointed this out to me. But it’s really important to call attention to the weaving aspect of a chain: new dancers being introduced to both right- and left-hand chains can sometimes suffer from teaching that describes the hand across as a “pull by” when in fact it’s a hand turn halfway. If one teaches it as a half turn, the dancers are facing in the correct direction for the courtesy turn — making it easier for the anchor dancers to step into the courtesy turn on the correct side of and in the correct rotation with the traveling dancers. If dancers think they are doing a pull-by, they head directly for their corner’s place and are going in completely the wrong direction for the courtesy turn. It can also help to teach the anchor dancers to shift into the traveler’s place beside them as it’s vacated — another detail that often gets omitted by callers, who expect dancers to learn this through experience (and indeed some aspects of contra are better learned through doing than teaching, although I believe it’s worth mentioning this point periodically in case people are at a place in their learning journey where they’re ready to hear it). Contra Camp is enthusiastically gender-free and called positionally; with all the dancers dancing both roles, it’s impossible (and meaningless) to make a distinction between a robins’ and a larks’ left-hand chain — so our experience didn’t shed any light on that aspect of Jeff’s comment. Louise (Winchester, UK) _______________________________________________ Contra Callers mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
