Had my first contra calling class last night. Merri Rudd is the instructor and organizer and there are 8 people in the class (although only 7 showed up tonight). We practiced calling Broken Sixpence by Don Armstrong over and over to get the timing right. A good thing to do; I got carried away with improvisation (it’s hard as a MWSD caller to call the same thing over and over) and lost the phrase once, but mostly I’m reasonably good at hearing the music and delivering the calls before the start of the phrase. Broken Sixpence is good for this because every call is an 8-count call, so 4-count call descriptions (“Just the men do-sa-do”) always start on beat 5 of each 8-beat phrase. We also practiced calling 2-count calls descriptions (“Men Go”), starting on beat 6, and finally 1-count descriptions (“Men”), given on beat 7.

Merri provided live music (5 Dog String Band) for us to do this to, and we’ll have live music again for the third session.

Speaking of Don Armstrong, I googled (there’s that verb again) Don Armstrong Memorial Weekend, which I attended in Albuquerque last fall, and found only one reference on the web. Too bad it’s in German, but there are pictures, including a couple of pictures of Bill Litchman (no direct site, but here’s an interview with him as director of the Lloyd Shaw Foundation Dance Archives), who’s going to be teaching our next session, which is on teaching. Just like MWSD callers, contra callers need to be good teachers; every time they present a dance, they have to (a) teach the sequence of calls, and (b) if necessary, teach the individual calls. The walkthru is an important part of the craft of contra calling, and that’s what we’ll be dealing with next week.

In the meantime, we’re supposed to pick out a dance to teach, and also practice calling Broken Sixpence and, presumably, the dance we want to present, to traditional music. Merri lent me a copy of Uncle Gizmo; she said I’d like it, and I do, although the medleys change moods and rhythms radically, which should make the practice calling interesting.