Cumberland Dance Week

What a Week!

I'm back from the Cumberland Dance Week, tired but happy. The week was just brimming with good folks, fine musicians, experienced dancers, and wonderful callers. On the calling staff we had Bill Litchman, Bob Dahlsemer, Chris Bischoff, Diane Silver, Susan Taylor, and Bob Tomlinson - and among the attendees were other good callers, Michael Barraclough, for example, and Kappy Laning, and our very own Eric Schreiber. Bob and I called three dances each during the late-night dances, and three of his and two of mine went quite well!

The big surprise was Bill Litchman. I don't believe he was really mentioned as a caller in the advance materials, or else I missed it. He was listed as a clarinet player. Now, I haven't always had great experiences with clarinets -- violin and clarinet is a tough combination, sonically, and I'd had a kind of bad experience with a clarinet-playing sourpuss when I was younger, so I was a little wary of Bill at first, but by the end of the week, he was one of my very favoritest people, uh-huh.

Bill has a dry, subtle wit, and he chuckles a lot and laughs easily, so he was an absolute dream as a band partner. When he said things, they were always so...wise and funny and smart. Little did I know in the beginning that he was in the callers' Pantheon, maybe even the Zeus of callers. So, while I had to miss the Callers' Workshop with the redoubtable Bob Dahlsemer, I was getting my very own tailor-made workshop with my stand partner, Zeus. ("Bill Litchman?" folks would tell me. Didn't you know? "He's the very best of the best.")

I gave him the short version of my adventures in English Country Dancing (we were playing the ECD class at the moment) about how frustrating it was to hear the calls only after the figure had already started, how it stopped my momentum and created a kind of chaos when other dancers were as clueless as I was as to what came next. "Oh, cadence calling," he said. "What?" I said. "Cadence calling. Like singing squares. You call the figure as it's being done. Of course, that only works when everyone already knows what to do, but sometimes, the calls are just part of the current action." At that moment, I felt two tectonic plates shift. A bit more description of the situation led him to agree that calling an English Dance to a group with some new people was not the time to be doing it, or else (get this) the dance was too difficult for the group. That is, if the dance were easy enough (very easy indeed, in my case) the dancers would remember the dance, so the calls being synchronous with the figures wouldn't cause a problem. See what I mean about the wisdom? I was going around "knowing" that Late Calls were simply Not Done, when, as so often happens, the truth is a lot more subtle than what I "know".

From Bill and from a delightful Englishman named Michael Barraclough, I enlarged my understanding of what the (British) English call ECD - it's a lot like the First Saturday Hatchling Dances we are planning! That is, there's really no special division of dances between "contra" and "English". It's all "Country Dancing". Circles, squares, longways, triplets - almost any patterned dance would be acceptable. American Contras are a special subset, as are Kentucky Running Sets (the ones brought back to England by Cecil Sharp). I forgot to ask about the vocabulary - whether or not everyone understands "Back to Back" to be the same as "Dosido"? Or "pull by right, pull by left" to be the same as "rights and lefts"? but my guess is that everyone is so bilingual in this regard that they wouldn't particularly notice, just as we might not notice if a caller called us "ladies" instead of "women" or vice versa.

The English apparently also have E-Ceilidhs, or, translated from Gaelic, "English Parties", which I understand to be filled with traditional English dances (including waltzes, schottisches and polkas) danced to somewhat traditional tunes, albeit with a Rock-and-Roll influence and played on modern electronic instruments, and "Barn Dances", which are like our wedding dances, or one-night-stand dances with easy dances for mostly non-dancers.

Alas, the one English dance I called at Cumberland, "Knives and Forks", did not go well. Nothing broke down, mind you, I just managed to suck the life out of the evening, even after my brilliantly stupid joke ("We would have had a Spoon, too, but the Dish ran away with the Spoon."). It was one of those dances in three, which for some strange reason I find difficult to call. I got just a tiny bit lost and wasn't sure I was in the right place, so my calls lacked a certain... confidence. Once again, I failed to prove that ECD is not slow and boring. Luckily, Susan Taylor is such a lively and non-boring English caller that she set the whole camp straight on THAT for an entire week, and my misadventure did not have any lasting effect.

The two contras I called, "Boomerang" and "Dancing Sailors" went very well, thank you very much, so the bruises to my personal reputation were pretty much healed by the end of the week, but I'm kind of determined to figure out a way to call "Knives and Forks" well.

M
E