Square Dance Experimentation

[bjarvis]

I started wondering a little while ago: who has to dance more steps, the folks dancing boy or girl? Does this vary from level to level? Do some callers make one role work harder than the other (at least in terms of dance steps)?

Tonight, the experimentation began.

Tonight was a rare 5th Thursday so DC Lambda Squares hosted an A2/C1 club night with Ett McAtee calling. I put pedometers on at least each dancer of a particular couple and recorded their step count per tip, noting which were A2 and which were C1.

While the pedometers are of the same manufacturer and lot, they have different sensitivity. I'm trusting that by randomly switching these between dancers across the course of the experiment, the variation will average out in a sufficiently large sample space.

The raw numbers aren't meaningful yet. I'll write more on this when I have a much larger sample. Who knows... it may be good filler in a slow news quarter for the GCA journal. :-)

Comments

[fuzzygruf.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't think that at MS/Plus you'd need the pedometers. Swing your partner, Ladies Chain, Ladies Rollaway, Teacup Chain all have girls doing more steps.

I'm interested in seeing the A2/C1 stats, though!

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

My intuition is that the girls have to take more steps in MS than the boys, less so in Plus and about the same in A2 and higher. Others have argued that while the girls have to take more steps --twirling, for example-- the boys have to travel longer distances walking around the outside of most commonly used formations. I'm curious if any of these preconceptions is actually provable scientifically, hence my little study.

The downside is that I rarely get to dance A2 --I've had precisely two opportunities since the Anaheim convention-- and even less exposure to C1 (since I don't dance it myself). It'll take a while to get a meaningful amount of data.

[tdjohnsn.livejournal.com]

The men should be moving on all the calls you listed. Unless the squares have gotten huge, the girls are only going a couple steps across the square, and unless the boys are standing there like lumps they need to be stepping out and to the side to let the girls come out into the correct position for the curtesy turn. The rollaway is the only one that the girls are moving more than the boys and even then that is only from a line...in a circle everyone is moving, the boys are just going to the side rather than rolling across. The little bit that the girls move more on something like a Ladies Chain 3/4 would be offset by all the times the boys Star by the left or right to pick them up.