Monday, January 21, 2008

Hubris Successfully Avoided

Well.

I called two dances at Childgrove tonight.

The good news is that much of the teaching and calling went very well.

The other good news is that I successfully avoided coming out of it thinking that I'm pretty hot stuff. How hard could it be to call a couple of dances, one of which is pretty easy, and one of which our group has danced quite often? Hard enough, it seems. Apparently you have to (1) be very careful you write your card out correctly - do not write "circle left" when the move is actually "circle right" - (2) call dances that are different enough that you don't confuse one dance with one full circle and one three-quarter circle with one that has two three-quarter circles, and (3) REALLY learn to time the dance better. The last time I called, I cut the dance off too soon. This time I let it run way too long. Bob said "Yeah, we began to think it was a bit too long when we started meeting the same people for the third time."

But what a kick.

Thank you, Ted.

M
E

1 comment:

contrawade said...

I guess it comes back to Kiran's admonition about preparation. Here, a small error in preparation (i.e. the card was wrong) caused a big problem with teaching the dance. Once you overcame that problem, the dance went smoothly, but probably the whole thing rattled you or distracted you so that you didn't mind the time. There's a lot to keep track of up there.

Chalk it up as a learning experience.