On 1/22/2016 7:02 PM, Martha Wild via Callers wrote:
Call a dance written by someone else:
Pretty much always, is my guess. If I note down a dance at a festival and I
like it, I call it, and try to get all attributions for announcement. Maybe if
there was a caller who stipulate that no one was to call their dances without
express permission or proof they’d bought the book - but I don’t know of a
caller doing that.
Agreed!
Publish a dance written by someone else:
If the dance is on the author's open website, or I know the caller personally
and know they are happy to have their dances spread throughout the community,
then fine. If a dance is in a book that one has to buy, then never - might
mention the name and author, and maybe the book, but I wouldn’t give out the
dance details. Don’t know? Don’t publish it.
I assume you're using "publish" to mean "disseminate" - give out the
instructions on mailing lists, let people see your card, whatever.
If so, agreed! To be excessively anal about it, I would disagree if
"publish" meant "include in a collection I was putting out to sell"
(without getting express permission from the author.)
Modify, borrow from, a dance written by someone else?
Always! If it’s a small change and I’m calling it I just give the author credit
and say it’s a slight variant (forward and back instead of circle left for
example). Using an interesting figure and sticking it in a new context
substantially different from the original - no problem, but I might credit the
original on a website for example - “inspired by Title, by So-and-So”.
Agreed. And sometimes the name of the new dance can have a nod to the
name of the old dance.
Very different from English Country, by the way. If someone has written a dance
there, and you realize that a turn single left would be so much more intuitive
and flow better than a turn single right, heaven forfend that you should
suggest changing the author’s original intention! Even if maybe it was an
oversight originally! Liberty is NOT to be taken, at least with modern dances -
though it’s a little grayer with traditional dances that various people
interpret differently because the original directions are sometimes obscure.
Not *always*. I have seen respected ECD leaders call things
differently than they were written, although they usually call attention
to it when doing it. I have also had someone ask me if a particular
modification of a dance I'd written - a right-hand turn instead of a
g-word - was acceptable to me, and I said "sure", and wasn't honked
that he called it that way. I was pleased when he put it on the program
of a ball he was calling, and then honked when the ball booklet had the
modified version and listed the dance as a collaboration between the two
of us.
As for me - as a dance choreographer - please feel free to spread my dances -
they are on my website, and I wrote them to go out into the world and be
fruitful and multiply and all that.
Thanks for that! I've called some of them and been happy to have them.
-- Alan
