There were about ten of the Hatchlings there, and four of us (Bob, Karen, Wade and I) called, collectively, 14 dances, of which exactly 14 were danced beautifully. We had gone in with the idea that we would kind of hang back and let the experienced callers have prime time, but it didn't completely work out that way. On Friday, we did call late, after 2:00am, but Saturday's calling is by lottery - and Karen was picked FIRST, Bob was picked about fourth, and I was about sixth. So what the heck. The band lottery is held before the caller lottery, so we were able to choose which bands we wanted to call to. Karen chose one of the coveted PigTown Alley spots (at midnight), Bob picked one of the U4 spots (at 10:00pm), and amazingly, the opening 8:00 spot was still open, so I picked that one. A respected authority had told me I should try to call first to give me a splash in the deep end, and Bob had wanted to call early, too, so we could pull out some of our easier dances.
My personal calling experience was mixed. The good news first - because I opened on Saturday night, I got to say "It's Saturday Night at Sugar Hill!" to a cheering happy crowd. And the band was the Corn Stalkers, Matt Turino and Ben Smith, the two amazing young fiddlers from Champaign-Urbana who played at Childgrove a couple of weeks ago. With Matt and Ben playing great dance music, I had the pleasure of calling, as a no-walkthrough dance, Gene Hubert's The Nice Combination, considered by some people to be the best easy dance ever written and Bob called Roll in the Hey, possibly the most popular easy(ish) dance ever written. The night was off to a great start.
(Hmmmm...Think I'll add the bad news in the comments. Maybe some of you won't read it.)
One of the things I learned for certain this weekend, is that callers are by and large invisible when they do an okay job. So I was really lucky to be first up and get to say "It's Saturday Night" and do a no-walkthrough dance, because people remembered me. Why did I need to be remembered? Because I did something so embarrassing on Friday night that I was sure my calling goose was cooked forever. (Cary Ravitz, whose dance I had muffed, kept reminding me the next day, while I was still suffering from the shame of it all, that "your first impression stays with people forever". Thanks a lot, Cary!
)So our eight o'clock dances went well. Our ten o'clock dances went well. (It was U4 playing, remember...) And though I'll leave their stories for them to tell, Karen's 12:00am dances went well, and Wade's 2:00am dances went well. The Hatchlings had a great Sugar Hill outing! Wahoo!
7 comments:
Here's the story of Martha's no-good, very-bad calling experience at Sugar Hill, and some lessons learned:
Lesson One: don't switch the dance you were planning to do at the last minute, even if Cary Ravitz himself tells you that you should not call a no-neighbor-swing dance at that point in the evening.
Lesson Two: if you switch the dance you were planning to do at the last minute, be very, very afraid.
The dance I switched to just happened to be, guess what, a Cary Ravitz dance, because it was the only dance I had in my "call these" section of my cards that had a neighbor swing -- two, in fact. "Breakup Breakdown," is a very nice but marginally confusing dance if the caller doesn't do her job well. I had called it twice at the Calling Parties, once badly, and once quite successfully, so I knew it was a little tricky, but doable. I figured, "No guts, no glory," forgetting the corollary, "Stupid gets no glory either."
Breakup Breakdown is a regular contra improper dance. Should be easy, right? But, ladies and gentlemen, I had carefully rehearsed the other dance I was going to call, and had especially carefully committed to memory that it was a Beckett dance, since it's so easy to forget that. Only, of course, my new, switched dance was not Beckett, and my cards do NOT say "This dance is NOT Beckett." In the B section, after everyone had started getting really confused because I said it was Beckett when it wasn't, if Cary had not been in the crowd to yell "The dance is not Beckett!" I would have needed a visit to the S***'s Creek Paddle Store (such a place actually exists).
So it was necessary to rewind.
I apologized, asked everyone to go back to place and start over again, but this time in Contra Improper formation, but GUESS WHAT! The hall at Sugar Hill, so delightfully reverberant if you are a musician, is maddeningly echoey if you are a caller. Even though I used my Outdoor Voice, there were some dancers who just didn't get the message, and one re-walkthrough turned into two re-walkthroughs. When it was time to start, someone requested yet ANOTHER walkthrough (we're on the fourth one, if you're keeping score). At the end, I asked everyone to take hands four where they were, and get themselves into improper position, but naturally, they had progressed three times, not two or four, and were pretty confused by this request, which they probably didn't really hear very well anyway.
So the dance got off to a rocky start, but thanks to the wonderful skill of the dancers who go to Sugar Hill, they got it fixed by the second time through and the dance went beautifully from that point on except for a little improvisation on the ends.
Nevertheless, as I pointed out in the main post, Cary did remind me the next day that, no matter how much I might improve over time, people would always remember their first experience of my calling.
Or at least he will.
This is why we constantly need to recruit new dancers -- people who don't remember that night at Sugar Hill when I tried to call the dance that was way beyond my abilities at the time.
Cary's right, people do remember, but that's not always a bad thing. Many years from now, when you're famous as the smoothest caller ever, it's fodder for fond remembrance.
--jerome
The last time I called at Childgrove, my teaching was a little rocky so I went through it 3 times. Afterwards, Deborah told me that my third time through it was probably more for me than the dancers (i.e. they actually had the dance by then). I think the same could be said for your Breakup Breakdown, um, blowout? While one person asked for another time through, by far most people had figured it out by then and we could have gone with it. Of course, my perspective may be a little skewed because Mr. Ravitz was in my set of dancers at the beginning of the walkthrough and he seemed to know what was going on.
Wade mentions the dreaded third walkthrough, which brings up the idea of a scripted refusal to do another walkthrough.
It could be brief: "I'm just going to start it, the music will help us get it."
Or it could be humorous: "Well, can you just fake it? That's what I'm doing."
In any case, we have to trust that dancers picked up much more than we actually saw them do. And we have to be firm in our conviction that what is needed most right now is music.
--jerome
Good point!
I agree with you - all night long, it was apparent that such good dancers would fix any dance by the second or third time through - you just had to move on to a new couple that got it already.
On the other hand, I had screwed them up by doing it just ONCE wrong, so things were in muscle memory that should not have been there. Knowing that, I figured it was a reasonable request. Unwelcome, but reasonable. I was wrong, of course...but...well... how do you know when you shouldn't be listening to people who talk to you from the floor, and even more to the point, how do you treat people who do?
Deborah said (I hope I'm semi-quoting her correctly) that you can say something like "We can talk about that later." She warned me even before she saw me call that I would be tempted to get into conversations with people on the floor (now why would she say that?).
But this wasn't a conversation. It was a request. What could I have said? "No"?
Hmm...How about "Oh, you'll figure it out. I trust you." Would that work?
M
E
If you ever ASK if your dancers need another walk-through, someone will ALWAYS say yes. Always.
If someone asks from the floor unsolicited, you need to consider whether or not to oblige. Hopefully, you've been watching the WHOLE floor during the walk-through, so you know if it's an isolated problem or not.
I've been known to say "I have faith in you" or "We'll all help each other out." "You'll figure it out" isn't as reassuring as it could be.
Also, consider tone. "Outdoor voice" is loud, but I tend to think of it as my "teacher voice." In other words, confident, which is tough when you've just been battered like that.
Don't beat yourself up too much--we've all had long walk-throughs. It's only a problem if you become known for them (no names mentioned here, but "SHHHHHHHH")
I really like "We'll all help each other out." It sends the right message, and, furthermore, it's true!
Funny thing about beating myself up. Even though I'm truly disappointed when things go badly, I know that they'll be fine the next time. Or at least, they always have been. Lord knows I've blown it Big Time on enough occasions, yet lived to tell the tale and laugh, that I am developing the sense that this must be the way I learn.
I would be happy if I never again had to experience that sickening sense that I have just caused an entire room full of people to roll their eyes, but for that to happen, I'd probably have to stop taking chances. I think instead I'll just learn to live with it.
M
E
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