I wrote a dance with a 4 person do-si-do and have called it a few times.
Whoever has to travel from the far corners will need an extra couple of
beats, so it's good to have a "soft" figure after the do-si-do for 4, so
the folks arrive late (men, in your dance, Luke) can catch up somewhat
gracefully.
As for treating it as a gypsy for 4, in my dance people liked going
forward and then twirling away to the right and back to place. This was
probably because it gave some ccw movement to contrast cw turns
elsewhere in the dance. To teach the figure, I've had dancers do a RH
star "but just pretend to touch" then walk through with twirls over L
shoulder.
Hilton Baxter
On 12/1/15 10:22 AM, Aahz Maruch via Callers wrote:
On Tue, Dec 01, 2015, Luke Donforth via Callers wrote:
Possibly this is a choreographic question already answered in square
dancing, but I'm not familiar with the outcome. How well does a four person
do-si-do work? I'm thinking of something along the lines of:
In the normal duple improper formation, a four-person do-si-do is called
zigzag, there are lots of dances with that. But that's not what you're
doing here.
In my head, the four person do-si-do is a right hand star sans hands; but
not sure how well it'll fly; especially since the right diagonal women have
less far to turn to face in than the left diagonal women coming out of the
chain.
From my POV, that's a four-person gypsy. Or maybe the square dance
equivalent would be promenade inside the ring. The key element of
do-si-do is facing the same direction during the movement (modulo the
contra variant of a spinning do-si-do or square dancing's highland fling)
and ending up facing the same direction at the end.
I recently saw a square dance caller struggle with explaining Walk Around
the Corner (which is square dancing's equivalent of gypsy) and See Saw,
failing to mention either of the "easy" ways of getting across the
concept:
* keep your shoulder toward the person you're walking around
* exactly the same thing as an armless allemande
Anyway, there are probably several ways to call what you want, but I
think that do-si-do ain't one of them. ;-)
