Tuesday's calling party took place on the night of the largest snowfall St Louis has seen since 1995, and yet eight hardy people showed up to dance English Country dances. What a bunch! Kay and Deb and Chrystal and Joe and Wade and Alice and Bob and I practiced our turn singles, our leading up and our casting down to a fare-thee-well. I did Turning by Threes again, and Key to the Cellar, and they're getting better...The music for those two dances is just heaven. One of the high points of the evening was doing both Fenterlarick and Chrystal's rewriting of Fenterlarick as a contra dance. That, and digging cars out of the snow after we were done.
Tonight's dance was planned to be more of a mixed bag, sort of like this second picture. But it was mostly contra, and very interesting. Greg brought a couple of dances to try his idea of teaching engage/disengage in contra dance by having various people blindfolded. We danced Becky Hill's Box the Gnat contra with one woman in each minor set of four blindfolded, then two women, then two men. Then we did Gene Hubert's A Nice Combination. Interestingly, the first dance was difficult for the men to dance blindfolded, and easier for the women, while the second one was the reverse. We discussed our experiences but did not quite figure out why. Doug called a lovely wedding-type dance which featured a poussette. Bob called his XYZ dance, which worked beautifully this time. Kay and Chrystal and Wade and Joe and David and I also called a dance or two, and lovely Reida came to dance.
We talked about the upcoming Hatchling dance April 6 and made a list of who the callers will be and what they would like to call. We'll work out in a different post which dances we'll be likely to do.
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