Back from CALLERLAB (more later) and off to celebrate my tenth anniversary at Ten Thousand Waves in Santa Fe.
However, on the sd-caller mailing list email today, I found a new site that looks good: 4Dance. I’ll have to explore it later, though…gotta get ready to leave.
I’m so used to being able to find info about all kinds of things on the web that it’s kind of a shock to run into a dead end. Later today, Jim Hensley is going to report to the whole CALLERLAB membership on the marketing plan that CALLERLAB is looking to implement. So I looked up Jim Hensley and marketing in some search engines. Little did I know that Jim Hensley is a pretty common name. And then I couldn’t find a site relevant to this Jim Hensley. You’d think that as a marketing person, he’d have a web presence.
Sounds like there are changes in store for Dosado.com. For one thing, the content on the front page is going to updated more freqently. Also,dead links are being pruned and new stuff will be added.
Dave Gipson’s site no longer has a list of callers; it’s now on Dosado.com: Caller Listing. I don’t think Dosado.com is trying to compete with Vic Ceder’s caller database. As I understand it, Dosado.com’s goal is to provide a quick place to look up a caller’s info.
I’m in Las Vegas at the CALLERLAB convention. Not a lot of time to do a lot of surfing.
Yesterday, I attended Cal Campbell’s pre-convention workshop on Party Dances (aka One Night Stands). There were about 18 people there, so it was a good turnout. Some of the info was useful; some was stuff that I already know from reading books by the participants (see Dancing for Busy People. The most useful segment was Bob Rigg’s on The Art of the Quick Teach or The Art of Entertainment vs. Education.
Then Clark Baker, Andy Shore, and I went to Mystere, the Cirque du Soleil show at Treasure Island. All I can say is, “Amazing!”
Looks like the normal, incredibly busy CALLERLAB schedule. More on what I choose to do later.
Have you ever been accused of dancing too much? Before I started calling, I was dancing three or four times a week (more if I could). If you too are dancing a lot (and find your relatives, friends, and neighbors looking askance), here’s a list of reasons: The Top Five Really Good Reasons for Dancing Too Much
Dancing and competition
I ran across this quote on a footbag (hacky sack) site:
In January of 1993 I became a contra dance fanatic: one of my main atractions to contra is its cooperative spirit. It’s one of those rare activities, like footbag, where the objective is to create fun through cooperation.
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I delved into this site, Footbag Peace Initiative, a litte further and found this:
Today, we kickers prize footbag as a highly athletic and cooperative dance form and a complete aerobic workout, comparable to a martial art. Since the early 80’s a small but growing group of sack enthusiasts have also developed a lively society of competitive footbag.
What struck me about this was that the author, who is clearly a peace and love kind of guy, is accepting of both competitive and non-competitive play. And I wonder why square dancers, in general, are so adament about resisting any efforts to add a competitive aspect to square dancing.
Depending on the kind of competition, I think it’d be fun. I personally wouldn’t care for ballroom dance style competition, where squares would work out a choreographed routine and practice the hell out of it, with emphasis on costumery and styling. The practice would bore me to death. But I think it’d be fun to try to dance as long as possible to a caller trying to be tricky. The practices would be fun and the competition would be nerve-wracking, but also fun.
Square dance competition is successful for teen dancers in the Northwest. Information on the teen festival can be found here: Teen Zone
Competition brings visibility and (shudder) commercial sponsorship. There’s competition in ballroom dancing (they even call it DanceSport), country-western dancing and swing dancing. There’s no competition, that I know of, in contra dancing and international folk dancing.
Square dancing doesn’t fare too well in most online encyclopedias; see
The Britannica had another interesting entry for the “Big Apple,” which apparently, in the ’30’s, was a square dance version of the jitterbug, where dancers did jitterbug moves prompted by a caller, although they also did their own moves a lot.
However, here’s a chance to write a scholarly article on square dancing that will be available to everyone. Nupedia, the open content encyclopedia, is a new project in the spirit of Linux and the Open Directory Project…that is, it will be created by volunteer editors and writers, and the content will be open:
The content of Nupedia is “open source” in approximately the same way that the source code for Linux is “open source.” This means, in brief, that anyone can use the material from Nupedia on web pages, in books or pamphlets, on CDs, etc., for profit, for educational purposes, etc. You may do this at your discretion, so long as you credit Nupedia prominently as the source and you do not try to deny others the right to distribute Nupedia material
Surely, somebody out there in square dance land would like to undertake to write a history of square dancing that would have tremendous distribution and influence.
BTW, as of 12 April 2000, squaredanceland.com is still available as a domain name. So is squaredancecountry.com.
Web design: Here’s an interesting article on using colors, shapes, and typography in web design: Visual Designer | Satisfying Customers With Color, Shape, and Type (Web Techniques, Nov 1999). Have you ever noticed the arrow in the FedEx logo? Look between the E and the x…
Interested in the history of social dance? The Library of Congress has put together a site detailing its collection of social dance manuals: An American Ballroom Companion. There are also a number of on linevideo clips of the various dances.
More on record databases:
Greg Malinowski writes that he also has an online listing of square dance records (Caller’s Page, use the left-hand framed menu) that has over 4000 entries. No ratings or cue sheets, but he does have a “theme” field, where he categorizes his records by things like “trains”, “military”, “sixties”, etc. Greg’s looks like it was generated from his database in 1997. It’s not a “real” online database, in that I can’t, for example, search for and get a list of all the records with a “train” theme. But you can do text searches once the listing is showing in your browser.
Greg has a lot of interesting things on his website. I have an unfortunate tendency to not pay a lot of attention to sites that aren’t kept up to date (and Greg’s front page hasn’t been modified since sometime in 1998). However, that doesn’t mean that the information isn’t still useful. One section that I think is very useful is the Teaching Think Tank, a collection of 1998 postings to the sd-callers mailing list about teaching the Mainstream calls. Lots of teaching hints and routines using the calls…if you’re looking for teaching ideas, you should check this out.
If you’re tired of starting out your sequences with H/S Square Thru 4, take a look at Greg’s Square Thru 4 Subsitutes, a list of 146 Mainstram and Plus equivalents for Square Thru.
I was in Philadelphia this weekend to call a fly-in for the Independence Squares. I had a great time calling with Tom Miller and Howard Richman; however, the weather was a little weird…going from balmy to snow in just a few hours. Fortunately, the Weather Channel was predicting exactly that, so we were prepared.
Now I have a few days at home, and then off to Las Vegas for the CALLERLAB convention. I’ll have to do some serious websurfing to find tidbits for SquareZ.
Vic Ceder’s online database of his records continues to grow. He’s added cue sheets (the words) and the ability for all of us to add comments. That means that this database could become a communal record of what we think about various square dance records…at least the ones that Vic owns. Vic has also rated the records, so you can search for the ones that he thinks are “5’s” (excellent). (So far, he’s rated 218 records (out of 1225). Out of those, he’s rated 163 as excellent, 49 as good, 3 as average, and 3 as below average. (My guess is he’s been rating the ones that he uses, and of course, that’s going to be biased towards the ones that he likes.)
How I plan to use his database: I keep my own database of records that I own (in a fairly complicated set of Filemaker Pro databases). I can see using Vic’s database to find new music. I find that our tastes are fairly similar; out of the records that he rates as excellent that I also own, I mostly agree with him. So if he rates a record as excellent that I don’t own, I would consider buying it. According to his page describing the database, he may one day put MP3 snippets on line, in which case, we can also go and listen to records that we might consider buying (assuming they’re still in print).
On Tuesday, Bob Brundage (caller for over 60 years), Lynda Haack (dancer and incoming president of the New Mexico Central District Square and Round Dance Association), Bill Litchman (president of the Lloyd Shaw Foundation and Director of the Lloyd Shaw Archives) and I met with a freelance journalist assigned to write an article on square dancing in Albuquerque for the weekly entertainment section of one of our local papers. It was a good interview, covered a lot of ground, and made the reporter want to take up square dancing <g>. She got to hear about both MWSD and traditional squares (Bob has called in both venues, Bill was trained in the Lloyd Shaw tradition in Colorado, I like contra and traditional, even though I only call MWSD). It’ll be interesting to see how the article falls out.
While I was at the Lloyd Shaw Archives (where the interview took place), Bill Litchman showed me (and I immediately purchased) a couple of CDs done for the Archives.
One is a two-CD set of hoedown music from the old Sets in Order records, originally released in the 1950’s. The records, owned by the archives, were digitally processed to remove surface noise and scratches and extended to about 9 minutes apiece to acommodate patter calling. These are all traditional tunes, with traditional instrumentation (except for Chicken Plucker and Guitar Fancy, which have some electric guitar and drums).
The other is Allemande Left! An evening of Western Traditional Square Dancing, which features Bill Litchman calling traditional squares to the music of the Sandia Hots. This is great for listening to a traditional caller both teach and call material that would be excellent for a dance party.
The CDs were produced by and to benefit the Lloyd Shaw Archives and are being sold for $15/per CD ($30 for the hoedowns, $15 for Allemande Left) plus $3 S&H. If you’re interested (and I hope you are), contact Bill.
The Hoedown CD set was also coordinated by Margot Gunzenhauser, a traditional square and contra dance caller from Denmark. Bill Litchman went to Denmark recently to do a callers school for traditional western square dancer callers; there were 50 people taking the school. That’s an amazing number for any caller school, let alone one for traditional squares in a small country like Denmark.
I’ve listened to and annotated the April Hanhurst tape. You can find my notes here. Remember, I have no advertisers, so I don’t have to be nice.
This is cool: Time is on the Move. I don’t know how folks find these things, but I found it at WebWord.com: Usability and Human Factors for the Internet, which is a weblog that I check occasionally.
Klezmer square dancing: I love it: A Klez Act – Klezmer, Contra and Square Dance – Photos. I’ve actually listened to my klezmer cds (yes, I’m a fan of klezmer music) trying to find instrumentals with a reasonable square dancing tempo. I haven’t found any yet…maybe I have to buy some new klezmer music.
This is the kind of square dancing home page that I’d like to see more of: Southeastern Mass. Square Dance Info. It’s a list of clubs and personal opinions on the clubs. What makes it interesting are the personal comments…not just a listing of who’s dancing what when to whom, but what kind of danciing, how the food is, what the usual attendance is, &etc. Too bad it hasn’t been updated since 1998. Also, be sure to check out the Open Letter to CALLERLAB, which talks about square dancing from the point of view of a “younger” (fifty-ish) couple.
Those of us who use MiniDiscs might find these April Fools pages amusing.
The SONY MZ-R100 minidisc Recorder
MZR-110PDA: This would really be a dream machine, especially if it added speed control…
Here’s an ambitious site for contra dancers: TCCD (Ithaca, NY): National Schedule Grid. I don’t know how they manage to keep it up to date, or even if they do manage… (although the info for Albuquerque looks very current).
Click on a city and a very attractive page comes up that’s filled in with info from a database. Looks like the individual dance series are responsible for keeping their database entries up-to-date.
A little more looking, and here’s the nitty gritty behind the grid: the Dance Database: DanceDB.tedcrane.com. It’s way cool…webmasters can even dynamically link to parts of the db to show up-to-date listings for dances in their areas. Here’s a list of dances in New Mexico, generated on the fly by the database:
This is what the National Square Dance Directory should be evolving into. Think about how you would try to find a dance in a city that you all of sudden have to go to on business. If you have a copy, you’d look in the National Square Dance Directory. Teeny little print and many out of date entries, but, hey, it’s there. Then you’d need to make some phone calls to find out how many of the entries are out of date and what’s really going on. If you don’t have a copy, you can start looking on the web and see if there are any websites listing clubs in the area. You’ll probably be able to find something, and with luck, it’ll even be kept up-to-date. However, suppose you’re out of luck there, so you try the square dance mailing list. Somebody immediately answers telling you that if you’d checked the NSDD, you’d have found…blah, blah, blah. So you’ve got some possibly out of date references to check. Somebody else will probably tell you exactly what you wanted to know…but it could have been easier…
Now think about going to the online square dance database. Do a search on the city and day. The records in the db will have information on when they were last updated, so you can see which ones are current and which ones need checking.
This is pretty cool: MessageClick. Ever since I switched to a network modem instead of a faxmodem, I haven’t been able to send or receive faxes. I still can’t send them, but I can receive them via email, and I even have a separate fax number.