This Week's Square Dance Update

I had only two square dance calling gigs this week: Monday's mainstream class with the DC Lambda Squares (only three more to go!) and tonight's mainstream class with the Chesapeake Squares (fourth week out of about 20).

Both are going incredibly well. The Monday class is ramping up for a big finish as we have only another nine calls or so left on the list. Everything they've been shown thus far has been snapped up and internalized very quickly: it's been a long time since I've seen a class 'get it' so fast.

The Thursday class is slower getting off the ground, largely because we keep getting new people joining each Thursday. I and the Chesapeake Squares' board agree that we aren't so swamped with people clambering to square dance that we can afford to turn away anyone. Here we are in week #4 however and we're barely past my usual open house material.

That said, I'm getting really good with open house/party nights. Such events used to frighten the bewjesus out of me: a good party night is hard, and there's the omnipresent pressure that you're the dancers' first entrée into square dancing. If you blow it after the club has done all that marketing, you'll probably not get them back, ever. An open house has to rock from the first moment to the last, and you want everyone to leave excited about the next one.

I had an English teacher in high school who told me, "Any idiot can write a novel. Writing a short story, now that's hard." Open houses are the square dance equivalent of short stories: you have to hook the novice participants with a very small working vocabulary and keep them entertained from the first word to the last with no room for asides, trivia or false leads.

Having done such weekly for nearly a month now, however, I've found my mojo for this. Tonight, I pushed further and more creatively than I have previously with very simple calls, using circles, stars and simple formations to easily build more complicated ones and still resolve them cleanly & with good body flow. Repetition helps newbies, but too much gets boring: I think I've handled the past few dances with a good balance.

I like teaching a great deal. I think I demonstrate good energy & enthusiasm, I like the challenge of describing a move multiple different ways on the fly to suit the needs of the moment, I try to be as clear as possible and, thanks to experience, I have a much better feel for times when I can simply talk people through a new call and when I should use other means such as a demo of the move with an assistant or a prop. Workshops are especially fun since the floor already knows the basic calls & vocabulary: it gives us all the space to explore nuances of the definitions or explore non-standard applications. It all takes more prep work than just a regular club night, but I love that part too: evil plots don't just hatch themselves, ya know.

The Chesapeake Squares class was initially to wrap up around xmas, but we may extend it into January if there is a need. I'm delighted the club's board is being so flexible: I'm sure it will pay dividends in an increased membership. The club's good health is definitely in my best interest as one of their staff callers.

The next two weeks are gonna be a doozy: I'm calling four nights next week and three the following, everything from class-level Mainstream (which itself varies depending on the class in question) up to C2. I hope to get a jump on some choreo writing projects this weekend.

DCLS' Harvest Festival Hoedown comes up in three weeks. I have flyers going up to New York for their 'Peel the Pumpkin' event this weekend, as well as flyers for our ACDC and GCA caller school events. I'm still trying to get the GCA webmaster to update the online registration form to cover the master class; I'll telephone him again before this week is out. I also need to write a more detailed article about the caller school and master class for the next GCA newsletter.

In other news, I'm working on a minor project for CALLERLAB: digitizing cassette tapes of recordings from previous conventions. Currently, I have the 31 cassettes of the 1998 CALLERLAB convention. An old walkman is playing them into the 'audio in' port of the workstation beside me, Audacity digitizing the lot onto the hard drive.

This weekend, I'll do some editing to splice files of the A side and B side of the cassettes into a single MP3 and try to normalize the recording levels. With a little luck, I should be able to ship the lot back to the home office early next week --at which time they'll likely send me a new batch. :-)

And that, more or less, is the state of my square dancing life. Not much dancing, plenty of administrivia and enormous amounts of calling. After the DCLS class wraps up in three weeks, I'll get back to more dancing again.

In Praise of Large Disks

I've been participating in a CALLERLAB project this month. Every year, CALLERLAB has been hosting a large conference of square dance callers, and most of the regular sessions (as opposed to committee meetings) have been recorded. In recent years, the recordings have been distributed on CD, but earlier years are on cassette tapes. We're now digitizing the cassettes into MP3 files for archiving and distribution.

I'm using an old cassette Walkman to play back each side of thirty-one 45 minute cassettes from the 1998 convention. The analog audio is piped into the sound card of a desktop workstation running WindowsXP and Audacity, sampling the data at 32,000 Hz. Last night, I finished digitizing the audio. The raw data on this first pass has chewed up 20GB of hard drive space.

Each side of each cassette was recorded into a single file. Today, I'm stitching the A & B data files into a single file, editing out the producer's comment "This is the end of side A. Please flip the tape over, rewind it and press play to hear the B side" and taking out any button click noise, then saving the resulting combo file, typically 600MB in size.

Once I have a single Audacity project file for each cassette, I convert the data into an MP3, typically about 70MB in size.

I'm keeping all of the intermediate files along the way so that if I find I've made a catastrophic mistake, I can pick up from part way through the pipeline instead of starting from scratch. And needless to say, I'm making a full backup of everything to an external drive every few hours, just in case I accidentally overwrite or corrupt any of my intermediate steps.

In all, I have 56GB of disk space tied up in this project right now. This isn't enormous, but it's enough that this work would have impractical if not impossible only a few years ago. A faster workstation with more RAM would have helped some of the editing and MP3 conversions but I was mostly constrained by the speed of the analog cassette playback anyway.

Now to package up the MP3 files and send them back to the home office...