Planning an Evening

Here are my sources:
Mac
Ted
Tony Parkes' book ContraDance Calling - A Basic Text
Seth Tepfer - Programming an Evening
Colin Hume on Planning a Programme
Carey Ravitz on Choosing Dances
Bruce Hamilton's pamphlet "Notes on Teaching Country Dance"
Larry Jennings' book - Zesty Contras

As near as I can make out, the common message is
1.) Come prepared to call at the level of the dancers
2.) Work for variety
3.) Start with easy dances. End with easy dances. Harder ones go in the middle somewhere.

There's more, a lot more, but these seem to be the basics. If anyone has a favorite source I've left out here, let me know!

I'll start my review of these sources with Tony Parkes' book. He says "Two keys to successful programming are variety and flexibility."

Of variety he says that dances can vary by formation (contras, squares, circles, scatter dances and couple dances), by basic setup (the dominant figure could be a down the hall, or a hey, or contra corners - don't do two dances in a row with the same distinctive figure, or by the music (fast, slow, reel, jig) or by degree of difficulty or the energy the dances take, or by social interaction (more interaction with your partner or your neighbor or the same sex person).

Of flexibility he says that if the group isn't what you expected, it's good to be able to reprogram on the fly. Here are the factors he lists that could cause you to have to do this: age (at the extremes, some dances will be too difficult), the dancers' experience level, whether or not the dancers have been drinking, gender balance, marital status or what we might call the "velcro couple" syndrome, hall size and shape, slippery floor, presence of posts, size of crowd (too small for some dances, too crowded for others), and the weather.

The book then has his graph of the excitement level of the evening plotted against the difficulty of the dances.


According to this chart, the hardest dances should be at the end of the first half, or in the first part of the second half. I remember Ted (or Mac, or both) saying that the "unusual" dance, the one that takes the most thinking, should go kind of in the middle of the second half, with dances requiring little or no thinking after that until the end of the dance.

I feel that our contra dances have had more or less predictable challenges, so the number of considerations that Tony Parkes mentions in his book is perhaps smaller - we wouldn't do any of the International Folk Dances that Tony says could add variety, the weather doesn't affect us as much as it could, and our dancers don't usually drink before dancing. Our floor is good, we have no posts.

BUT

Sometimes the crowd is smaller and the bottom spreads out so far people have to run to get to the next set. Sometimes the crowd is larger and there's not enough room to dance some moves. We do get velcro couples. We sometimes get a biggish influx of beginners. We have at least one less-experienced dancer who asks newcomers to dance and then thinks it's okay to miss the walkthrough so that he single-handedly creates a vortex of chaos that knocks out three groups at once. So we have our challenges. We need to know how to pick dances that meet the need for variety, but we also need to be sure we choose dances with recovery points in them, like long lines forward and back, and long partner swings...

If someone wants to read Tony Parkes' book, I can lend it to you. You can also see Deborah Hyland to take advantage of the Childgrove Lending Library, which has other books of interest. These books are listed on the Childgrove Caller Resources page.

M
E