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.
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.