Calling for the "Kids"

Now that I've finally joined the dancecaller blog, I thought I may as well share my experience calling for the post-Thanksgiving Youth Contra dance. This was a very different experience than calling a dance for a room full of experienced dancers, or for that matter, for a room half-filled with experienced dancers. I think four people shared the calling duties (Larry, Eileen, me, and some young girl whose name I forget). I would guess there were around 30 dancers, maybe 10 of whom were experienced. As a result, small mistakes made on the dance floor were not self-correcting, and neighboring dancers couldn't (didn't) do much to straighten things out when things went amiss. Now, the flip side of this is that the dancers were really rather well behaved and attentive! There was very little chatter on the floor during the walk-throughs, and they really seemed to want to figure out how the dances worked. 

I called two dances during the evening: Reel Easy by Cary Ravitz, and Duck Soup by David Kirchner (which I had called at Childgrove's open calling dance). Reel Easy was the first dance I called, and Larry graciously provided me with a video of my teaching and calling of that dance, which is VERY instructive to watch. To my shame, the teaching took over 8 minutes! (Other callers had similar times). Why so long? Partly because I wanted to make sure that the dancers had really learned how the dance worked, so I was being very deliberate in teaching, but on reviewing the video I think that I was perhaps too tentative. The dance starts neighbor do-si-do, neighbor swing, but by the end of the swing there was at least one couple with the lady and gent on the wrong side of each other. I saw one couple in the wrong place and corrected them, but the video shows that I missed another couple. The next move was long lines, then ladies allemande right in the center 1 1/2, and with people out of place there was confusion. At that point I decided to start again and there was a request to split the dance into 2 lines, so we did that. Already, 4 minutes had elapsed! On the second time through, an entire set of dancers again ended the first swing out of position, but this time I spotted it. As callers we are not supposed to say "Yo, guy in the glasses and beard, the lady goes on your RIGHT!" I think I said "You should end the swing with the lady on the right side, so that lines on the sides are alternating men and women. If two men are next to each other, one of you is in the wrong spot." I don't think this worked very well. 

Eventually, some one on the floor got them positioned correctly. They did the lines forward and back, ladies allemande 1.5, partner balance and swing just fine. With the circle left 3 places, neighbor allemande right one time, pull by right to new neighbor one set got mixed up. I stopped to straighten them out, but in the time it took to do that, one couple decided that they didn't have a couple to dance with and moved from the center of the left line to the end of the right line (in fact, the next couple just had not yet caught up to the pull by right to the next neighbor). Nothing to do now but say "Um, you folks can't leave the middle of the set! You have to come back, it will work, trust me!" To my great relief, when they came back I did a second walk-through and it went smoothly. I sent the dancers back to place and started the dance, and bless them, they danced it! I had to keep doing partial calls for most of the dance to prevent it breaking down (there was a brief collapse in the right line, but they recovered), but they got through it, and judging by the applause they had a blast. 

I don't have a video of how "Duck Soup" went, but I think that teaching that worked better: I had more prior experience with that dance and the dancers had more experience by the second half of the evening. Perhaps the biggest snafu was that I split the long line into two short lines, and then had to move it back to one long line. 

In short, it was an eye-opening experience. Novice dancers throw curve-balls at you! Being under-prepared in such a situation causes problems. I didn't know my first dance that well and came off weak in teaching it, killing at least 2-3 minutes in the process as a result. However, it was really very thrilling when they responded so positively after each dance. Its one thing to get applause from experienced contra dancers, but when you get it from dancers who maybe don't know how much fun they can be having it means even more. And the applause isn't even for you the caller, its for the whole thing that just happened, and you had a part in making that happen.