Just returned from a square dance weekend—lots of fun, way too much food, not enough sleep… all the things we love about dance weekends.
There were two nationally known callers trading off hour-and-a-half time slots in two halls—Mainstream and Plus-level in the gym, Challenge and Advanced dancing in the cafeteria (cement floors all around; need I say more about that?).
One of the callers was great at calling the advanced dances—I watched some of that and it was obvious that those dancers were having a wonderful time. But when her turn came in the other hall, where I was dancing, she either couldn’t or wouldn’t “dumb it down” so that the rest of us could dance, even when the dances were supposed to be Mainstream!
The moves she called were “legal,” all right, but somehow she managed get us so far out of our accustomed positions that it reached the point where it was not fun but chaotic. I’m a fair-to-middling square dancer—been dancing, on and off, for nearly 30 years, including some of what we used to call all-position dancing—and even I nearly walked off the floor twice when she was on because I couldn’t do anything she was calling—NOTHING. I looked around, and seven of the eight squares on the floor had broken down—this happened repeatedly. It wasn’t just me who felt that way: Saturday night one entire square walked off the floor.
Now, when you’re a caller, don’t you try to call more or less at the level of the room? I kept thinking about Mac’s advice for us to have a simpler dance in our back pocket to pull out if the floor breaks down. As a dancer, I like a dance that’s just beyond my comfort zone as well as the next person. But if you as a caller challenge your dancers, shouldn’t it be a challenge, not an attempt to see how many of them you can break down?
Luckily, the second caller was fabulous and wonderful to dance to. Lots of dancing from unaccustomed positions in the square, which was fun; I learned a lot, that’s for sure.
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2 comments:
Kay,
This has been a long time complaint about modern western square dance. At the end of last year I was reading back issues of "Northern Junket", Ralph Page's 'zine on square and contra dancing, which was published during the time that MWSD evolved from traditional square dancing. He frequently complained about callers pushing too much new material at dancers, to the point where people would simply get fed up and drop out of the dance scene. Realize, this was written 50 YEARS AGO!!
So yes, its a problem, and its nothing new, and we should ignore this problem at our own peril. Good calling starts with clear teaching, and the less experience the dancers have the more important good teaching is. Everyone will have a better time if we do simpler dances that are taught well than if we do more complicated dances that are taught poorly.
Wade
At a dance after a long, hard-dancing contra weekend, I was dancing at our regular dance with a couple of folks who do not generally move very far or very fast. I found myself enjoying the slowdown a LOT. I had to kind of rewrite the dance to make it fit our pace, but the slow dancing was just my speed, tired as I was.
So today I was fantasizing about having a slow line - not a "bad" line, but a "gentle" line. I imagined older folks enjoying it. I imagined new dancers enjoying it. I imagined the folks recovering from injuries enjoying it.
The problem comes in what you would then call the other lines. "The moderate line"? I don't think so. "The HotShot Line"? I should hope not.
I do think we need to give people the pleasure of a challenging dance but wouldn't it be nice to give people also the option to choose to slow it down? Perhaps we should NOT try to get our experienced dancers into the third line unless they are willing to dance less vigorously.
Conversely, I know that if I dance in the teen line at Cumberland, I'd better be ready for Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. When I'm rested and warmed up and feeling pretty good there's nothing more fun than that sort of high-energy twirl-a-whirl.
So yes, after a couple times out of watching dances not go so well because they were too hard for me to teach efficiently and clearly (yet), I'm all for following Mac and Deborah's advice about keeping it simple.
But I still hope I can figure out how to give dancers a good, successful, just-beyond-the-comfort-zone experience. I guess this just shows that I'm still a newbie caller.
M
E
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