Today's Square Dance Caller Workshop

We had a good time today.

I was initially worried we wouldn't have a comfortable number of dancers for the workshop. This was the only weekend which worked for us but it was also coincidentally a weekend when many other DC Lambda Squares members were already booked or otherwise unavailable. My worry was unfounded though: we had ten people willing to dance while a caller was on mic and another queued up for the next session.

The four callers working today all had different skill levels and goals. Joe Harr is very new to calling; he needed mic time for the basics (flow, sequencing valid calls together, mic technique, etc.). Abe Feldman has been calling sporadically for about a year; he worked on flow, smoothness and vocal delivery. kent4str and I have been at this for years and were largely working on polishing our presentation.

caller_dayle walked us through our segments, one by one. Everyone got two gigs on the mic and a post-session review.

We kept the dancers amused through the breaks --if you feed them well, they will return in future. I'd also like to think they enjoyed the dancing too.

We wrapped up after three hours, ending around 4pm. Some of the leftover refreshments will go with us to C2 dancing tomorrow, the rest will be consumed here at home through the balance of the week... it's a good thing I like ham sandwiches.

And now I have no more calling gigs until October 26. I should be using that extra time to memorize more get-out sequences and preparing for our next brainstorming conference call on Sunday, November 7.

Today's Square Dance Caller Workshop

We had a good time today.

I was initially worried we wouldn't have a comfortable number of dancers for the workshop. This was the only weekend which worked for us but it was also coincidentally a weekend when many other DC Lambda Squares members were already booked or otherwise unavailable. My worry was unfounded though: we had ten people willing to dance while a caller was on mic and another queued up for the next session.

The four callers working today all had different skill levels and goals. Joe Harr is very new to calling; he needed mic time for the basics (flow, sequencing valid calls together, mic technique, etc.). Abe Feldman has been calling sporadically for about a year; he worked on flow, smoothness and vocal delivery. kent4str and I have been at this for years and were largely working on polishing our presentation.

caller_dayle walked us through our segments, one by one. Everyone got two gigs on the mic and a post-session review.

We kept the dancers amused through the breaks --if you feed them well, they will return in future. I'd also like to think they enjoyed the dancing too.

We wrapped up after three hours, ending around 4pm. Some of the leftover refreshments will go with us to C2 dancing tomorrow, the rest will be consumed here at home through the balance of the week... it's a good thing I like ham sandwiches.

And now I have no more calling gigs until October 26. I should be using that extra time to memorize more get-out sequences and preparing for our next brainstorming conference call on Sunday, November 7.