I've been contradancing since 1986 and there was clapping on Petronella turns
*then*, and there were some people who were opposed to it, and I never knew why.
I think the arguments about acoustic latency and throwing the band off are good
explanations for why it's a bad idea to, say, clap along
with most people, but with some it's
just what feels right, and it can work very well.
Jeff
On Wed, Mar 13, 2024 at 7:00 PM Winston, Alan P. via Contra Callers
mailto:contracallers@lists.sharedweight.net>>
wrote:
Katherine --
I think that the way you were doing the ballroom swing bef
Katherine --
I think that the way you were doing the ballroom swing before you modified it
is not how most of the rest of us do it, and that this in itself produces some
of the problems your modification solves.
I'm sure under the impression that the 'standard' ballroom swing [*] has the
I don't know whether I was that someone. If it was, what I talked about, if
you have a large enough group to do it (say, 10 or more, which I rarely do), is
to have them all circle up [which I always do as part of the implicit
dancing-to-the-phrase, things-take-standard-numbers-of-steps, early
Huh. I thought "Jump Jim Joe" *was* the less-racist alternative to "Jump Jim
Crow" (a dialect song and dance from 1828 which pretty much kicked off the
whole enterprise of blackface minstrelsy).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jump_Jim_Crow
However, here's somebody in 2012 dropping "Jump Jim
Over in English dance land, Bruce Hamilton used to describe the amount of
pulling force as "about a sixpack's worth". (He was talking about the
long-armed English turn rather than the thumbs-up/bent-elbow allemande but I
think it's the same thing.)
More recently he's been taking that the
Michael, you're puzzling me.
1) Maia's dance is "Happy Jew Queer", which is a joke on "Happy New Year". You
keep calling it "Happy Queer Jew" and I don't know why. It certainly loses the
joke.
2) I don't understand why you'e explaining to. Maia how Maia's dance works.
[I can see why you'd
High five!
-- Alan
From: Mary Collins via Contra Callers
Sent: Friday, September 15, 2023 12:28 PM
To: Contra Callers; Shared Weight Contra Callers
Subject: [Callers] A little self congratulations
A few weeks ago I called some squares and simple old
I'm astonished I have anything to add to Katherine's (and Tony's) great advice,
and I have no argument with anybody else's, but a couple of other things which
apply to weddings where few of the guests are dancers already. This is my
experience - I'm just a caller, don't do sound, don't have
That's just hilarious.
What I see are 4 identical black rectangles with
FREE IMAGE HOST
404
NOT FOUND
in white lettering on them.
Which, granted, does make it look like things are rendeering the same way
everywhere, but I'm pretty sure it's not what you meant.
-- Alan
I can't remember what level of complication / sophistication works for your
dancers.
Listening to the tunes I heard bitty 4 count things in the As and longer
phrases in the Bs.
If you want to work with rather than against the music, your As should be
something
like
Nobody reading this is actually going to care about this, but just because I so
rarely get a chance to correct John, I will.
See this: https://www.kickery.com/2010/10/swing-corners-vs-turn-corners.html
"Turn corners" is two-hand turns, and it involves actives turning *only* their
corners,
I don't have any great wisdom to impart here, but it's a general topic I'm
extremely interested in. I've been more concerned with these questions in the
English dance scene, and I want to validate that these are difficult questions.
I don't understand what the goal of an advanced contra dance
Louise --
"Caller's Box" has separate entries for gate and hand cast, but hand cast says
"Very similar to a gate" and the gate entry says "Very similar to hand cast."
So you're not alone.
The caller's box gate description is ":Two people face the same direction,
hold nearest hands, and
Just searched my on-disk notes, and discovered two dances that call out
Beaumont Rag as a suitable tune.
Balance the Star by the McLain family. A Sicilian Circle,. suitable for
beginners
Notes here:
https://www.library.unh.edu/special/forms/rpdlw/syllabus2013.pdf#page=17
"Colin's Carnival
Hi, John.
I do think it's interesting that (North American) contra rules are that both
couples swinging in the middle at once is too crowded, but (North American) ECD
is totally fine with everybody doing two-hand turns (which have a bigger
radius) at once, and a Community Dances Manual dance
Emily--
Swings in the middle work fine if there's only one couple doing them.
In your Jefferson and Liberty (which is Dudley Briggs' "Jefferson Reel" rather
than the historical Jefferson and LIberty), the 1s don't swing at all and the
2s only swing if they cheat while the 1s are going down
Bob, thanks for posting that link.
Yeah, I think I’ve heard that tune for contra. That tempo seems a bit slow for
contra.
It’s very much 8-count phrases and not so much internal punctuation. A long
lines forward and back would be fighting the music - you want something there
that’s kind of
Hello to Halifax!
Some thoughts inspired by this:
I haven’t worked with bands that are heavily oriented toward Quebecquois music.
I have, a few times, worked with bands that were largely or exclusively
old-times or had no contra experienced and played for listening, with a mixture
of
Hi, Julian --
I'll await other answers with interest, since I similarly don't have a caller
website and it's a Project I could theoretically do but am rather overwhelmed
by. (Pre-pandemic I was getting all the gigs I could realistically handle with
a full-time job, more outside of contra than
Amplifying Jimmy Akin's suggestions:
One online source for easy dances, once you get away from typical contras, is
"A Barn Dance Repertoire".
https://barndances.org.uk/difficulty.php
(The things ranked as difficulty 1 are in general pretty easy, though some of
them are really not
Don --
You helped with this when I was writing it.
"The Lowdown" was cionstructed for a medley of "Lowdown Hoedown" and "Beth
Cohen's Reel" by Larry Ungar. (Normal length, and there' some old-timey tunes
that work well with it too.)
(Not sure why it's deprecated on Caller's Box.)
Seems like even in those days, birds were sometimes people rather than birds,
eg "birdie jumps out and the crow jumps in".
-- Alan
From: Jon Greene via Contra Callers
Sent: Saturday, February 11, 2023 2:36 PM
To: ROBERT FABINSKI
Cc: Shared Weight Contra
Hi, John!
I assume by "looking to the right when looking across the set" you mean "people
who are looking to the right to look at their corner" rather than just
"across". (I've found that things like "when you're facing your partner, if
your right hand is closer to the person diagonally
Jeff Spero wrote:
--
But… as dancing resumed, there seemed to be a shortage of callers here and I
ended up being asked to call the first dance since the beginning of the
pandemic. I was not thrilled about calling ladies/gents, nor was I prepared to
call larks/ravens. So I tackled
Oh, and another thing, which I really should have said somewhere in that long
screed.
To me, part of the essence of country dancing, what makes it attractive to me,
and why a
community grows around it is that we all need each other to for this kind of
dancing to work.
I could have a
Since it looks like we're sharing experiences, evolutions, and thoughts on
calling terms,
I'll throw in mine, and it's going to be all over the map. Let me stipulate
that I'm a cis-het guy and my relationships since, oh, 1990 have been with
women I've met at dances.
My first country-dance
Hi, Allison!
Spitball suggestion about courtesy turns for your group in particular (not that
I’d do it in a regular beginner workshop). Teach them the courtesy turn hold
as a promenade hold (left in left in front, right in right behind), then do a
super-simple mixer (partners promenade in
".
It links the role of 1s/2s to the familiar line-of-direction we use
for promenading and coupledancing
-- who feels most "normal", and who feels as if they're
accommodating/supporting.
On 2/4/23, Winston, Alan P. via Contra Callers
wrote:
> To your questions:
>
> 1
To your questions:
1: Right, the vast majority of Sicilians are completely symmetrical.
2: Because of this, I don't think there's a default for whether CW or CCW are
the "1s". You can just pick which one you want.
3. Yes, there are non-symmetric Sicilians -= I'm looking at notes for "The
John is of course corrrect that grapevine exists in other contexts than IFD.
However, I'm pretty sure I'm right about the source of the grapevine step in
contra dancing in the SF Bay Area in the mid-1980s because I know some of the
people who were doing it were involved in IFD.
-- Alan
Here in the SF Bay Area, when I started contra dancing in the mid-1980s it was
pretty common for people to use a grapevine step in any circle in any contra
dance. I guess that fell into the category of "common variation" rather than
choreography that used it. I think by 2000 it had become
In “The Mixing Bowl”, middles balance and box the gnat. What do you do for
determining who goes under and who goes around in the box-the-gnat? (I can
think of rules like “shorter person under”, “work it out during the balance”,
“person coming from the clockwise-facing line goes under/over” -
Rereading your original post I can't see how I was confused about whether
three-face-threes and triplets-without-contra-corners were two separate
questions either and yet I wrote a response with three-face-threes without
contra corners or swings.; (To be fair, I was really whacked after a
I can't speak to whether this is absolutely original, but as. a choreographer
myself who was completely dry for over a year during the pandemic - after
wearing out my interest in Zoom adaptations of existing dances, new solo stuff,
etc - it felt really good when that spring started flowing
I think the coordination problems of a promenade hey will make it take more
longer than do-si-do as couples. The exterior of the hey is extra-wide, if
you pass in the hey you have to pass wide of two people - it's going to take
longer than solo heys. (I can't tell you how much longer.). I'm
I really don't have time to get sucked into an interesting philosophical
discussion today, but it's catnip for
me and I can't resist.
I think we've got two different categories that have the same name (or at least
the same informal name).
Levi Jackson situation:
- It was written for ECD
Linda --
The handshake thing made me think of the English ceilidh dance "Buttered Peas"
(although it doesn't have the same handshake pattern). Here's a video of it
being called then done to a moderate tempo bouncy reel or polka with no
particular support for the shake/shake/shake
Just got this notification in the mail today; there's a dance in Monterey (a
blue-tier county) on Saturday:
Subject: Reminder: CONTRA DANCING this Saturday! Plus, fun contra meetup in the
park that afternoon
To: Monterey Contras mailto:monterey...@gmail.com>>
Please join us for the fun this
Susan --
I would cancel.
Delta is projected to keep getting worse through October/November so September
will still be on the upward slope.
Even with your restrictions and outdoors, an unknowing asymptotic spreader
could infect many people, even vaccinated people. The six feet social
On community dances: When ceilidh caller Hugh Ripon visited the Bay Area in the
early 2000s, I learned (and he left me a copy of) his piece of paper with his
entire repertoire on it. It was the names of about 50 dances, all of which he
had completely memorized, but he had the piece of paper so
I once gave Ted Sanella an airport-to-dance-camp ride and had a good chat with
him (late '80s, early '90s, somewhere in there). He mentioned then that he
liked to write notes on his cards. If the band played something that worked
really well for the dance he'd ask what it was and write it
The only time I've called in person in the last year was an outdoor English
dance a week or so ago and I just chose dances I remembered well enough not to
need notes.
I've found myself, when calling contras particularly (especially in areas where
the dance is, say, monthly and gets lots of
It definitely doesn't do anything about ASCAP/BMI.
From: Bev Young via Contra Callers
Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2021 7:45 PM
To: contracallers@lists.sharedweight.net
Subject: [Callers] Re: Caller's Insurance?
The National Folk Organization has liability
Susan --
Are you a callerlab member? (I'm not. When I got Callerlab insurance through
CDSS, I don't believe it included BMI/ASCAP coverage. [This was years ago and
I'm not a square dance caller and I almost always work with live music or
(rarely) recorded trad or historical tunes that
Indeed, my NFO certificates have the Marsh logo on them, the same as my CDSS
certificates used to.
But I know nothing yet about COVID-related liability.
-- Alan
From: Don Veino via Contra Callers
Sent: Sunday, April 11, 2021 5:51 PM
To: Luke Donforth
Cc:
Lenore --
bacds.org has some stuff on the home page (sponsored by bacds and other SF Bay
Area organizations); first one is Sunday afternoon the 26th.
Cdss.org has more, at https://www.cdss.org/community/covid19/online-events
That includes a pointer to Lake City every Thursday night.
Hope
Hey, Claire!
I don't have any prewritten choreographies to offer at present.
I'm enjoying the magnetic pool noodles thought, and appreciate your ingenuinity
in coming up with a way to, basically, make everyone's arms extra long and not
have to touch something other people touch.
(I can't
I'm writing as a happy attendee of several of Dugan's classes.
I really enjoyed the classes I took - Dugan had organized them so they work
really well over Zoom, and they work well for mixed levels of experience - and
even as a pretty experienced caller I felt that I learned something and was
For barn dance purposes, I have a variation on one of the "Three Meet"s from
the community dances manuals.
A1: threesomes link arms, go forward and back
Threesomes in promenade direction promenade to change places with
the other threesome, facing back the way they came.
A2:
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