bjarvis | New Square Dance Project Starting Tonight!

kent4str and I are starting a new square dance-related project tonight, ~~'cause square dancing shouldn't be just limited to five nights per week~~ responding to local demand: a multi-week Advanced workshop.

The plan isn't to teach the entire A1/A2 list from scratch. Rather, we're looking to provide a comfortable environment to coach some of our newest and/or weakest Advanced dancers up a few notches, to provide floortime at a measured pace and take more time than a regular club night would allow to workshop particular calls and formations. If time allows, I'd also like to explore some calls from unusual or non-standard positions.

We have the community hall of a local UU church booked for nine Wednesdays beginning tonight, 7:30-10pm. The dates were specifically chosen to be after Labour Day but wrapping up before the DC Lambda Squares' Harvest Festival Hoedown in November. We also selected a night which doesn't interfere with the club nights of the Chesapeake Squares (Tues) or DC Lambda Squares (Thurs), among others.

Tonight will be the first session. I'm planning to simply call through the entire Advanced list to see where the weaknesses are, then work on some of the fundamentals (eg. casting, as in cast off 1/4, 1/2, 3/4, push-cast, lefty cast, etc.). We'll also have a clipboard available at the side so dancers can write down what they'd like to workshop.

I had hoped to have a more detailed curriculum devised last week but time got away from me. It might have been a futile gesture anyway... each dance floor always has a way of surprising me on what they do well and where they falter. (Last night, I called "spin chain & exchange the gears"... the floor attempted "relay the deucey" instead. Huh? Ah well... gotta love their creativity!) I'm spending a block of today ironing out a possible teaching order so we'll have a fallback plan if no one is enthusiasm for shouting out what they'd like us to do.

This project is a first for us in one particular way. We've initiated this entirely on our own: it is not a club-sponsored event. Yes, we had some prodding and requests from various dancers and the club board has given us their informal blessing and included us in their newsletters, but we did the work and will be handling the monies on this one. I'm personally looking forward to this as a chance to call more Advanced, both scripted and extemporaneously. I'm also planning a few A2 singing calls to break up the evenings a bit. As a friend pointed out, it's about making your own opportunities.