As a new caller, I¹m looking for advise and/or suggestions for events with a very small number of dancers, 3-6 couples. At a dance I called in August (granted a slow month) we had at most five couples and that was if I and a couple of people who came to play music danced. I threw away my carefully planned program and wound up doing a number of triplets (thank you David Smukler) and a four-on-four that I modified so that it stayed together as a set and resulted in a change of partners each time through. It was a little clunky but it mostly worked and gave us some variety.
I am of course trying to avoid the scenario of people spending half the dance as neutrals when there only four couples in a set, and I¹m not really ready to take on learning some squares in the next few days which would be the obvious choice. I am hopeful that there will be more people this time, but in case I¹m in the same situation again, I¹m studying more triplets, a couple of dbl-progression dances for 4+ couple sets (so that no one waits out at the end for long) and looking for other ideas. Levi Jackson Rag is a possibility, but I¹d still like to have some other options in my pocket. It did occur to me to suggest an extra couples dance or two just to break things up if we¹re doing lots of short dances with 3-5 couples. Thanks, Will Loving