On 5/30/2012 11:15 AM, Becky Nankivell wrote:
Once upon a time when I was starting calling and also involved with
organizing the multiple-caller contra dance in Tucson, Arizona, we
maintained a notebook where each caller (or an organizer) recorded the
dances that had been called in an evening, and a few other notes on
the evening. The idea was that this would be a resource that a caller
could use in planning the next dance.
I don't know that any of the callers except for me actually ever used
this (and I know I didn't use it frequently), and after a few years
the practice was dropped.
This still seems like a good idea to me for venues where there are
multiple callers. I know that I keep a record myself so that I don't
call the same dances too frequently at one venue, (and in planning an
evening I check for the distribution of figures). If you're not a
regular dancer at a venue (whether you're visiting, or just dancing
less frequently), without some record it's hard to know what's been
called.
Nowadays, an electronic record would be easy to share, via web posting
or a file. Our not using the TFTM notebook was probably because the
dance planning happened at each caller's home, and the notebook wasn't
handy.
Are there communities that are keeping such records and making them
available? Comments on that from organizers and/or callers?
The trick is, as with any record keeping, it requires someone or some
people to make sure it happens and to keep track of the file(s)...
In the Bay Area, this is a common practice for most English dances and
I'm unaware of it being done for contra dances at all.
For English, several of the dances have email lists for people
interested in that series and programs are posted after the fact. One
person - Mary Luckhardt - maintains cumulative spreadsheets of dances
called for all the series. I also collect that information from the
posted programs and keep my own lists. This is important in English for
a couple of reasons: There's a core set of dances that we agreed some
years back we'd like to have done at least annually at our regular
dances, so that we can maintain some kind of common repertoire in the
face of the explosion of new and newly-reconstructed dances. We like to
visit the dances that are on the Playford Ball program (different each
year) so that people don't come to them cold, so it helps to know which
ones have been done. And we don't like to repeat dances from week to
week unintentionally. In English, a repeat is really a repeat - same
figures, same tune, only one tune per dance. (And in venues like Palo
Alto English, with a house band that's mostly the same from session to
session, that tune is likely to sound very much the same each night it's
played.)
In contra, those drivers are pretty much absent. If I call Al's Safeway
Produce this week and you call it next week, and I've got a band that
plays four-part medleys of Scottish-only fiddle and bagpipe tunes with
piano backing and you've got a fiddle, mandolin, and guitar old-timey
group who rip through one tune per dance, the dancers are going to have
a really different experience, and only proto-callers are likely to
notice that they danced the same figures two weeks in a row.,
This is my guess about why we don't keep track here, which is very
different from saying it would be a bad idea. When I've been a visiting
caller at some dance outside my usual area, I would have loved to have
seen some typical programs with caller notes about how they went over.
(I'd like to see dance notation, too, rather than having to guess which
"Top Spin" they did.) It would also certainly be interesting to see the
development of dance programs over time. Although I don't do
International Folk Dance myself, I've seen some interesting analysis
done of how programs changed over time, which was enabled by IFD's habit
of recording dances done.
-- Alan
