Hatchlings at Youth Contra and Jovial Beggars Dances

It was a fun weekend for Hatchling callers and for young people in Missouri.

Hatchling Callers called the Youth Contra Dance on Friday night at Larry Boyer's invitation. Many thanks go to Larry for inviting us, and to the callers: Chrystal, Joe, Wade, David, Martha and Bob. Wade did a masterful job with the beginner class.

Bob and Kay and I drove down to Rolla on Saturday night to attend an English Country Dance run by a remarkable young woman, Kimberly Hall. We had arranged with her to let us call some dances. Kay called Knives and Forks, I called Hole in the Wall, and Bob called Jefferson and Liberty. It was amazing, to say the least, to see a hall filled with 60-70 young people, successfully dancing English Country Dances, many at a high level. The band was a family band, mostly - Dad Ed Galbraith plays guitar and his four kids and their friends played keyboard, recorder, fiddle and mandolin, and very well!

M
E

Extra Calling Party Wednesday April 23

Good party last night!

There were at least 13 of us, maybe more if someone was lurking in the kitchen when I counted - ten dancing, one calling, and a couple of people on the couch.

We each called dances we think will be good for the Youth Contra on Friday, and, serendipitously, we were able to make up a good program just from the dances each person chose - circle mixer, easier dances building up to harder ones, then backing off. I'm expecting surprises - either the dances we chose will be a little harder to teach than we thought, or the kids will learn them so fast we should have chosen more challenging dances. They're all reasonably easy and fun dances so we should be able to stick to the program, but I'm braced for a "learning experience".

People often tease me and suggest I ought to learn to call while I play the violin, so what the heck, I'm going to try it. It worked kind of okay at the calling party last night, though each part (the playing and the calling) suffered a bit. I'll let you know how it turns out. No promises, though, especially since I have to get up at 4:30am on Friday for a Blackthorn Morris appearance on St. Louis Today.

M
E

Slow motion car crash

I finally brought myself to listen to my calling on the dance that fell apart, and it was very interesting. First time through, fine, second time through not bad, maybe a little shaky. Third time through, pretty wobbly in parts. Fourth time through I started right on time for A1, but blew it at the beginning of B2. 

The trouble I had was that A2 is a short wavy line balance to a neighbor swing, and I think I was calling it "Balance the line and swing your neighbor" on the 1 2 3 4 counts of A2, as opposed to calling it on the 5 6 7 8 counts of A1b (which is where you would call it if it was just a neighbor balance and swing). As a result, there are only 8 counts where I remain silent, as opposed to 12 counts of silence during a balance and swing. When I finally screwed it up beyond recovery, it happened because I thought that I hadn't waited long enough for the swing to end, so I let the swing go for an extra 8? counts, putting me behind on the calling. In truth, I was skating on thin ice before that point, and had nearly messed up the call 2  or 3 times already. Perhaps those small errors started the confusion on the dance floor.

The tune, Shady Grove,  has a peculiar structure that maybe threw me a little (I think Ellie said that it ends on a 5 chord and starts on a 5 chord, so there isn't a sense of resolution at the end of the tune), but it should have been danceable. To make matters worse, I'm familiar with the tune but I  don't play it, and in my mind I consider the A part of the tune to be the B part. So when I made an attempt to jump in and wrest control of a very confused group of dancers, I started calling A1 of the dance at B1 of the tune, and almost no one was at that spot in the dance.

It reminds me of losing control of my car at high speed on the highway: you swerve a little bit and the end of your car slides out to the right, then back to the left, then further to the right, then further to the left, then suddenly you are going down the highway sideways at 55 mph! Or backwards even (I've had both happen). With the car, I was able to straighten it out and keep moving, but I'd been driving for 15 years before that ever happened to me. Maybe with a little more calling experience I'll be able to do a 360 degree spinout of a contra dance and regain control without stopping, but this time all I could do was hit the emergency brake, get back on the road, and put her back in gear. I think it worked. 

Wade 

Congratulations!

Congrats Hatchings! I think we did really well. Glitches are expected, our recoveries were right on. Let's do it again. (Do we have any dancer feed-back yet?)

Joe