bjarvis | Today in Triangles

This year, I'm going to be a staff square caller at DC Lambda Squares' Harvest Festival Hoedown. Sure, I'm the part-timer and junior caller, but it's a start and I'm delighted & incredibly honored to be asked to participate.

One of the questions I was asked by the event chair is if I had any particular specialty or gimmick which they could highlight in the schedule or promotional materials. My response: I will by November. :-)

I began working on a particular project across the Memorial Day weekend while we were vacationing at the trailer in West Virginia: triangles. Clark Baker and

billeyler have carved a space for themselves in the calling world with their different flavours of hexagons; being able to work with triangles as a subset of hexagons should (a) allow me to work with a smaller number of dancers, and (b) piggyback somewhat on the work & theory Clark and Bill have already done because, as someone pointed out, triangles could be thought of as "heads-only" out of a hexagon.

To start, I separated the Mainstream (and later the Plus) square dance call list into three groups: calls which aren't sensible/possible in triangles (eg. anything requiring eight dancers), calls which can be done with trivial modifications (eg. right & left grand shortened to three hands instead of four) and calls which need no re-interpretation at all (eg. partner trade, single hinge, courtesy turn, etc.).

Borrowing from hexagon theory, one is must adjust some calls to smaller versions of the original. Where a flutterwheel normally sends a belle 1/2 across the square to meet a new beau and escort him 1/2 back across the square again, the triangle belle would go only 1/3 across then take her new beau 1/3 more. A triangle scoot back doesn't do a full turn to one's original partner but instead 2/3 around the set to a new partner. In nearly every call, the dancers need to "underachieve," going 1/3 or 2/3 rather than 1/2 or full turns.

Mapping out the circulate patterns is pretty intuitive for the caller & dancers. Seeing one's corner as being effectively one's opposite is not intuitive but dancers will accept it as a necessary variant from standard squares.

This afternoon, we had a calling workshop at our home with ten dancers (including

caller_dayle) to practise various projects.

kent4str wanted to test his selected C1 material before taking it to the IAGSDC convention in Chicago as well as sight-call some Advanced; I wanted to see if my triangle test figures worked as well on humans as they do on paper.

On the whole, things worked pretty well. I have a few figures which stumbled but I can recode them for clarity. The Mainstream list of available calls for triangles was pretty slight: I think the dancers didn't really get into it until I upped the ante to include Plus calls (diamonds, chase right, trade the wave, etc.). Even so, we all agreed triangles alone would be a tedious hour by themselves at a fly-in.

Based on today's early successes, I'm going to propose an hour at the fly-in to be called "Non-Square Squares," offering a smattering of triangles, hexagons, three couple dancing (say, a single head & two sides), six couple dancing (two couples at each head position and a single couple at each side) and such. I'm sure I can keep it entertaining without being too mind-bending if I spend no more than 15-20 minutes on each variant, including the teaching portion.

Which means I have a lot more writing & testing to do between now and November.