Holidays, NSDC
I think there’s lots we can learn from other dance forms (and vice versa, of course). So here’s a page on club organization which has some useful info: How to Start a Folkdance Club
Looking for a different way to approach square dancing? Check out Geomotion: two-couple dancing using square dance terminology.
It’s sometimes hard, when you’re calling for the same group of people week after week, to come up with ideas to keep the dancing fresh. One way is to focus on music and themes. Check out Funky March Holidays for some interesting days that one could commemorate musically. For example, did you know that this Friday, March 10, is the anniversary of the day in 1876 that Alexander Graham Bell said his few words to Watson? There are a bunch of singing calls related to telephones, including “Why Haven’t I Heard from You” which starts off with “Back in 1876 an old boy named Bell invented a contraption that we know so well.” And Saturday, March 11 is Lawrence Welk’s birthday. Seems like almost all of MacGregor’s records sound like Welk arrangements.
How to find possibilities for a Lawrence Welk night:
- Go to CDNow, do a search on Lawrence Welk, and look at the contents of some of his CDs. I looked at one called Biggest Hits, and found that I had three of the listed cuts: Twelfth Street Rag, Peg O’ My Heart, and MacNamara’s Band. 16 Most Requested Songs contains Ain’t She Sweet and Beer Barrel Polka. These are just records that I happen to have…you probably have others that are listed.
- Check out one of the several web sites on Lawrence Welk, like The Lawrence Welk Show. You might get some ideas on possible theme-related songs. For example, just about anything with “champaigne” in the title would be appropriate.
Went to PlanetClick, yet another directory of web sites. This one allows anyone (except Mac users) to rate websites (I wonder if that affects the ratings…no one who uses a Mac has any influence). I couldn’t figure out how to suggest sites to add, but maybe that’s part of the no-Mac-users rating system.
They do have some square dancing sites; there are about 53 “rated” (by non-Mac-users) sites. Then it looks like the find request is forwarded to Google, so a ton of non-rated sites show up. Now, aren’t you curious as to who got the top rating? Six sites (one of which is no more) are tied with a rating of 8, but the one that comes up first? Jim and Jean Square Dance Company, Jim Cholmondeley’s site.
Speaking of directories, I’ve become a square dance editor for the Open Directory Project.
Does anyone else think it’s tacky that the National Square Dance Convention websites (a) don’t have their own URL and (b) are hosted on commercial sites? To be fair, only Baltimore is on a site with ads (AOL Hometown), but Anaheim has some totally unmemorable URL at EarthLink. St. Paul has actually obtained its own URL (51nsdc.com). Kudos to them for joining the computer age. However, it seems to me that the national committee ought to get a good url (nsdc.com and nsdc.org are both taken, but long domain names have become available, so nationalsquaredanceconvention.com is available), and provide subdomain hosting for the annual conventions.
Consider the IAGSDC: not only do we have conventions with memorable names instead of numbers (this year, Crack the Crab is in Baltimore) but we also have an umbrella organization with an appropriate URL that provides subdomain hosting for member organizations.