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Mainstream Square Dance Class
Apr. 24th, 2007 08:55 amLast night was the second-last mainstream square dancing class. It went well: our new dancers are still absorbing calls at a fantastic rate. Still, we have a few calls left to tackle next week when I was hoping to dedicate the entire evening to practice, drill and flourishes.
The obvious danger of a semester-length class (14 weeks) is that there isn't a lot of padding when things go catastrophically wrong. With Warren's unexpected passing and the church being unavailable one session, we effectively lost four classes out of the series. We could have easily absorbed the church unavailability but I'm not sure how we could have planned for the death of the instructor. Let's hope that was a one-time event.
Our class has the fundamentals down pretty well: the most frequently used calls are in good shape and while there is a brief pause before starting, say, 'spin the top' or 'chain down the line,' their execution is solid once they start moving.
Calls still to cover are 'tag the line' (full and half), 'Dixie style to a wave,' 'thar stars' and 'alamo ring'. We were hoping to get 'tag the line' into last night's session but we ran out of time. As possibly the least used calls in the list, we intentionally left the thar family to the end: with so little time left to the course, we opted to work the most frequently used calls in a form of square dance triage. It's not what I wanted, but we work with what we have.
The newbies have a three hour workshop with Jim Wass this coming Saturday to rehearse more of the calls and variants. I'm working on a document to send Jim so he isn't going in cold, and I trust him to recognize where the class is having issues and getting them up to speed appropriately. We're also planning additional workshops and extra club night floor time immediately after the Rehoboth, DE, fly-in to work out any last kinks but I think they'll be in good shape for the upcoming fly-in.
The obvious danger of a semester-length class (14 weeks) is that there isn't a lot of padding when things go catastrophically wrong. With Warren's unexpected passing and the church being unavailable one session, we effectively lost four classes out of the series. We could have easily absorbed the church unavailability but I'm not sure how we could have planned for the death of the instructor. Let's hope that was a one-time event.
Our class has the fundamentals down pretty well: the most frequently used calls are in good shape and while there is a brief pause before starting, say, 'spin the top' or 'chain down the line,' their execution is solid once they start moving.
Calls still to cover are 'tag the line' (full and half), 'Dixie style to a wave,' 'thar stars' and 'alamo ring'. We were hoping to get 'tag the line' into last night's session but we ran out of time. As possibly the least used calls in the list, we intentionally left the thar family to the end: with so little time left to the course, we opted to work the most frequently used calls in a form of square dance triage. It's not what I wanted, but we work with what we have.
The newbies have a three hour workshop with Jim Wass this coming Saturday to rehearse more of the calls and variants. I'm working on a document to send Jim so he isn't going in cold, and I trust him to recognize where the class is having issues and getting them up to speed appropriately. We're also planning additional workshops and extra club night floor time immediately after the Rehoboth, DE, fly-in to work out any last kinks but I think they'll be in good shape for the upcoming fly-in.
