Here’s a description of The Perfect Caller. This applies to traditional/contra callers, but some parts apply to square dance callers also. Some excerpts:

• never suffers from stage fright (improves with experience) or memory loss, never repeats bad jokes, has no irritating mannerisms and is never conceited or rude.
• explains everything briefly but clearly, can tell who has not understood and what they haven’t understood, and can explain again, in different words, as many times as necessary, without boring or patronizing the expert dancers. The Perfect Caller has a cribbook handy, just in case, but does not need to refer to it, and never reads it out word for word.
• can suggest that couples or partners swap around without making anyone feel inferior. Of course the Perfect Caller never has to stop the music and explain the dance again, but if a dance does “crash” the Perfect Caller stays calm and polite.
• improves its calling by learning from its mistakes (despite never making any), learning new dances, watching other callers and copying/avoiding what they do, and occasionally inviting criticism from friends.
• runs faster than a speeding train, clears buildings in a single bound, washes whiter than ordinary powders, contains no artificial flavorings or colorings …

So what do you think makes the perfect caller?

Heiner’s site contains some other interesting documents:

• Notes from a Don Armstrong Caller Seminar
• Dick Leger on caller schools
• Grand Square Workshop
• Notes on Phrase versus Beat

I’m heading off to ACDC 2003 this weekend, to dance to Anne Uebelacker, Mike Jacobs (Mike doesn’t have a website, or even a listing in Vic’s database, but if you google him, you’ll find lots of info), John Marshall, and Linda Kendall (you’ll need to google her also). Should be lots of fun!

Got email tonight about a marketing meeting in Southern California. Here’s part of the blurb:

This meeting will consist of presentations, panels and discussions. The presentations will be made by marketing experts who will provide extraordinary guidance for us. It will be an open meeting with lots of audience participation. The sequence will run from defining marketing through choosing markets and communications, to looking at the economics and presenting specific projects to make it happen.

By the end of the meeting you will understand why marketing is much more powerful than recruiting, what is possible with a marketing approach to growing square dancing, and how to make square dancing attractive to more of the people you want to join you in it. You will also have a sense that square dancing can really happen, why it hasn’t been happening, and what you and other dancers can do.

There’s going to be a website, but it’s not up yet. The main site (godance.us) just has a pretty logo. But it’s a good domain name…

I wonder if this is a James Hensley project; Hensley was hired as the CALLERLAB Foundation’s marketing person. At any rate, I’d love to see a report of the meeting and a description of the various presentations.

Sometimes, I enjoy playing with anagrams, and here’s a site that makes it easy to generate a ton of anagrams. But it’s hard to find any that make even a little sense.

• square dance = careen squad (sometimes I think I’m in a square that meets this description)
• square dance caller = arcane call used req
• square dance caller = el rascal card queen
• CALLERLAB = Clara Bell
• CALLERLAB = abler call
• Swing Thru = hung wrist (true when someone won’t let go…)
• Wilde Bunch = club whined
• Kristin Jensen = ink jet sinners

The Mainstream Committee is doing its biennial survey to determine if any calls should be added or removed from the Mainstream list. Given that CALLERLAB as a whole is trying to shorten the MS list, it seems silly to ask for additions to the list. So even though I really miss Fan the Top, I didn’t suggest putting it back on the MS list.

I did suggest dropping Circle to a Line. Here are the reasons I gave on the form:

It’s a Catch 22 call: if you teach it “right” (by the book), dancers have to learn “slide to a line” when they start to dance in public. If you teach “slide to a line”, (a) you?re teaching it “wrong” and (b) your dancers might run up against a group where they do it “right”. It’s not an easy teach, it doesn’t add much variety (at least in the U.S.) and there are plenty of other ways to get into facing lines. Callers have different ways of wording the call (“circle up four, head gents break to a line of four vs. “circle to a line”, etc.)

I’ve gotten to the point where I dread teaching this call (except at the Wilde Bunch, where we long ago gave up any pretense of doing it the “right” way, and unabashedly teach the way virtually everybody dances it).

First, it’s not an easy call to teach, assuming one’s teaching the “right” way. At the Texas Callers School last summer, one of the students talked for about 20 minutes, motivating and explaining the call before starting to teach it. Sure, there are ways to explain it and get dancers through it, including the silly twirl (I like the circle halfway, veer left while the outfacers California Twirl approach). But it always feels like a kluge to me.

Second, there’s the issue of how it’s defined vs. how it’s danced in real life. Recently, at a beginners’ class, I explained the issue to the students and taught them the way it’s danced by the local dancers. Immediately, the angels decided to start dancing it by-the-book, thereby proving me wrong. (Of course, if I had taught it by-the-book, the dancers would have done their usual slide to a line…like I said, it’s a Catch 22.)

I hardly ever use it; when I do, it’s a conscious decision…”oops, I haven’t called Circle to a Line in a while, better throw it in.” I prefer Lead Right, Veer Left, Bend the Line for getting from a squared set to facing lines with partners; if I really need them in sequence, I can add a Right and Left Thru or some equivalent.

In the US, it’s almost never called except after a Heads or Sides Lead Right. Occasionally, it’ll be called after a Centers Pass Thru, although with Plus floors, some squares will inevitably Single Circle to a Wave instead. In the US, it’s never called from any arrangement except normal couples. So it adds little choreographic variety, and it’s an awkward call for the end girl who’s supposed to twirl under (except that she doesn’t, because dancers hardly ever dance it by definition).

So I say, dump it. Some modular callers, who like to start everything from L1P/1P2P/Zero Lines, would need to learn some equivalents…let ’em. My guess is we could just stop calling it and the dancers would never miss it.

This is cool: software that can recognize a tune that’s hummed into a microphone. It can not only recognize it; it can also generate the note structure for the tune. Now, you could take the tune and run it through other software that generates accompaniments, and there’s your singing call…assuming you can carry a tune…

Here’s a discussion on singles and dress codes from the European Association of American Square Dancing Clubs. First, the instigating article, which set off a bunch of replies. Interestingly enough, the initial article could have been written by a square dancer from the United States: “I came to dance with my spouse, and I want everyone to wear the square dance costume.” I kind of like the misquote of Gloria Krusemeyer’s sig line: “MWSD is terror set to music”. (Her actual sig line is “MWSD: Tyranny Set To Music – Abolish the Dress Code”.) But I’ll bet some people find the first quote totally accurate…

Here’s a nice positive article on square dancing. Unfortunately, the link looks like one of those temporary, current edition kinds of links, and I didn’t see an archive on the site, so it may disappear next week. (Actually, there is an archive search feature, but it’s buggy; clicking on links just takes one to the current page.) Since it’s such a nice article, I may archive it here someplace so it won’t get lost in the bit bucket.

I had a great time dancing at the Southern Arizona Square, Round Dancing and Clogging Festival and Swing Thru Arizona last weekend, although I enjoyed the Southern Arizona (Tucson) event only because some friends of mine from Albuquerque also attended. Until they got there on Thursday night, I was just standing around; I didn’t see any (other) singles anywhere. Also, the format of including rounds and clogging makes for very long interludes between square dance tips. So it was kind of a relief to get up to Phoenix, where being unattached is no problem and there were only squares. Not to mention being among lots of friends.

Andy Shore brought up an interesting issue for callers as we get ready to send new dancers out into the world: how do we prepare them for the many different ways that callers word the calls. For instance, some say “heads lead right and circle to a line” while others say “heads lead right and circle up four; head gents break to a line of four” while others have other variations. Or “single file circulate” vs. “column circulate” vs. “all 8 circulate”. I guess we have to train ourselves to use different wording so the dancers will be exposed to it.

I got to dance all weekend last weekend to Mike Jacobs at PACE Nor-Cal: C1 on Friday, C2 on Saturday, and C3A on Sunday. Mike called his usual interesting stuff, and I got to hang with people I like…well worth missing the annual meeting at the Albuquerque Square Dance Center, even if I am on the board.

This weekend, I’m heading off to Arizona (nice mid-seventies weather; we like that in the winter) for two events. On Thursday night and Friday during the day, I’m dancing at the Southern Arizona Square, Round Dancing and Clogging Festival, and for the weekend, I’m dancing at Swing Thru Arizona. The callers for the Tucson event are Tom Miller, Bill Harrison, and Jerry Jestin. Vic Ceder and Michael Kellogg are calling in Phoenix. Should be a high energy weekend.

Gloria posted this to the sd-callers mailing list. But since she gave permission for it to be published elsewhere, and since the sd-callers list isn’t archived anywhere, I’m going to post it here.

Gloria often has very interesting opinions. While I don’t always agree, I often do. Since I really like dancing (and calling) extemporaneous choreography, it’s hard to acknowledge that we may need to return to more “set” stuff. But when I see how much people enjoy “vanilla” Plus, with its fairly repetitive patterns consisting of combinations of long calls like Relay the Deucey and Spin Chain and Exchange the Gears, I think it’s true that square dancing might be more popular if it emphasized a more “set” dances.

Anyway, here’s Gloria:

One approach to making MWSD more accessible is to admit that we have to simplify the entry level AND keep enough people happy dancing at that level. My suggestion is to reach a better balance between hash and pre-choreographed dances and dancing.

Walk thrus allow for more complicated choreography than hash, and repeatedly dancing the more interesting dances/choreography over the course of weeks/months/years makes them more accessible for the slower-learning dancers – some will have seen the material previously and be able to help the others, even if only by easier reconstruction of their own part.

One thing that will have to be addressed is the current preference for apparently-spontaneous choreography, i.e. hash, by the callers. At the challenge level, almost all the material called has been worked through before the caller gets on stage. This pre-choreographing of material is one of the things that makes challenge dancing challenging to dance – moves are put together in a wider variety of ways. It’s simply not reasonable to expect most callers to be spontaneously imaginative, even with a small set of calls.

But why should the dancers be limited by the on-the-spot creativity (and/or memory) of a caller?

Here ends my basic proposal. The rest can be considered as optional reading, or fluff.

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To make sense of my proposal, it might be useful to look back on how traditional square dancing evolved into MWSD. The following is my inacurate, overly generalized and biased recreation. Read and critique it as a model for current thought, not as authoritative history. Also remember that all history (the current writing about past events) reflects the current world and writer as much as it does the past.

It all started when square dancing became a fad. The way I’ve put it together is that some people got so “into” square dancing that they got bored with the “traditional” stuff. It’s one thing to do visiting couples stuff [and equiv.] once a month at the local grange, but another to do it every week. Traditionally, “everybody” knew all the local dances, the music started and the dancers started. Somewhere along the way, still back in what we consider traditional times, a caller or callers [one for each square, or as far as an unamplified voice could carry] got into the act because not quite everyone knew what to do when. I’ve heard that a New England (square and contra) caller would bring different size megaphones to a dance based on the projected attendance.

Another development, once a caller got into the act, was the “walk thru”, because not enough knew the local dances and/or more dances were being imported and/or choreographed.

This is the stage at which “traditional” contra dancing breaks away from what is now MWSD, so the next development is where I claim MWSD becomes unique.

Some/enough of the square dancers got tired of having to walk through the very basic stuff every evening, so they started having classes to teach the basics. At first the classes would be two, then four weeks.

With classes, a “dance” could be called to a floor which was expected to already know [xxxxx -> zzz]. That allowed the choreography to get more interesting/complicated, which was just fine and dandy because the dancers could handle “learning” that amount in a walk thru. At some point, the walk thru of various sections started being done to music, with “random” interconnecting stuff to get the dancers back to review a difficult part, or on to the next… So a “tip” was getting ready for a pre-choreographed dance and then the dance itself.

Some callers got ambitious and started making an art of changing the connectors between the “interesting pre-choreographed” stuff that would be used for the singer, so the first part of the tip woud become more “hash” than prep for the pre-choreographed dance/singer. Eventually, using pre-choreographed material became blah….. [These days, how interesting is the choreography on the “sung”/flip side of a singer record?]

Hash became more “the thing”, so classes would have to include more fast-recognition and response to calls (i.e. hash dancing). Of course, the callers kept inventing new calls, and the locals didn’t want to have to be taught these calls each dance, so the lessons became longer to include more calls. Also, both dancers and callers were traveling past their own valley by now, so “the complete dancer” had to learn how to do not just one caller’s favorite set of calls, but multiple local and regional caller’s “stuff”. At some point, big dances would publish the calls, or moves, that would be used at that event, so everyone attending could learn the dialect.

There was this continual battle between developing new stuff/calls (which would be done by individual callers, then spread around as others thought it deserved) and wanting to limit what the poor dancers had to learn before they stepped on the floor. There were various attempts to regulate this development, ending up with CALLERLAB and official levels, as we now know and love/hate them.

Eventually, Plus became the “desired” local level of dancing in many areas, and the choreography used with this larger vocabulary became simpler, because dancers can only learn so much before they step onto the floor, and something has to give. Another group of callers, ACA, decided to recognize this de-facto standard and have “their” list which is a subset of the CALLERALB MS & Plus lists that incudes the most-used and “favorite” calls, thus legitimately reducing the teaching time before getting onto the dance floor.

I would be interested in hearing about the similarities and differences between vanilla-Plus and the ACA list as actually now danced, but suspect that this is a very touchy subject. [The ACA is very seldom mentioned on this list, and usually as being a splinter group of callers.] I’m not sure if the ACA list can be discussed without all the emotional baggage, but I can hope.

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Anyway, what is wanted is a combination of more complicated choreography than is presently realistic on an entry-level dance floor yet with a smaller vocabulary (calls) so the entry class time can be reduced. This, realistically, means callers using more pre-choreographed stuff, at least some of which is used as a complete unit, and using what is now the “hash” part of the tip primarily as a means of teaching the pre-choreographed stuff by breaking it down into smaller parts and drilling the dancers as necessary. Doing this teaching of complicated pre-determined stuff in an interesting manner is a skill that many callers will have to learn or relearn.

The balance between pre-choreographed stuff to be used in the “singer” (which doesn’t need to actually include lyrics if the choreography is complicated enough) and extemporaneous hash is something that will vary by the skill of the caller, the difficulty of the dance, and the strength of the floor. An evening’s program should include a variety of dances, so the ratios can change each tip….

Most texts for contra callers includes a section on programming an evening, building up the difficulty of the dances and varying the style, including dancer energy required, through the evening. I’m sure that there is similar stuff in MWSD texts that would be useful. It would be worthwhile to review “obsolete” references for pertinant ideas – why re-invent the wheel?

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Humbly submitted for (hopefully constructive) critiques,
Gloria Krusemeyer Northfield, MN

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I did not cross post this because it’s a generally bad practice. However, I give permission for anyone to re-publish this if proper credit is given and exerpts are not taken out of context.