Just back from square dancing...
Aug. 9th, 2005 10:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bjarvisKent stayed at home with a minor tummy bug so I drove up to Baltimore solo. We had a low attendance at club night for reasons not immediately clear to me: rather than observing and analyzing, I actually had to dance this time so we had a full square. Worse, I had to dance girl. I dance boy 99% of the time so dancing the girl's role took a lot more CPU cycles than dancing normally would. Fortunately, it was all Plus tonight so it was only a minor mental workout.
My own tip went rather well. I ran through most of the Plus program in the patter portion, focusing on smooth vocal delivery and consistent smooth dancer flow. There were a couple of minor hiccups but they were trivial and a clever bucket stir ending pushed it from most people's minds I think.
The singer wasn't too bad either. It was a number I hadn't used in public before but like last week, I had rehearsed it relentlessly at home over the past several days. Delivery wasn't too bad, vocal range was OK, projection was OK although I did miss a few beats when the dancers did something unexpected. I have to spent some time with the recording to see if it was something I called inaccurately/inappropriately/untimely/inaudibly or if it was actually a dancer (or two) who simply goof the call. In any case, it wasn't catastrophic and a quick repair during the bridge fixed everything.
In the third figure, I had a minor epiphany about my singing calls. Actually two epiphanies: the first was that my mental process for sighting the resolution & delivering the calls isn't the same process for recalling & delivering the lyrics. Switching between mental modes takes a half-second too long and it blows my timing. The second epiphany was that having a mid-singer epiphany is itself rather bad timing and cost me another half-second. Doh.
I'm not sure now how to smooth out the mental context switching but further rehearsing a number as well as more practice with pre-programmed modules may help. I'll try week of practice to see what happens.
Next Tuesday, it'll be the Kent & Brian show at club night as Dayle & family are heading to San Diego for 10 days' vacation. Oh boy! More opportunity to experiment with new material! :-)
My own tip went rather well. I ran through most of the Plus program in the patter portion, focusing on smooth vocal delivery and consistent smooth dancer flow. There were a couple of minor hiccups but they were trivial and a clever bucket stir ending pushed it from most people's minds I think.
The singer wasn't too bad either. It was a number I hadn't used in public before but like last week, I had rehearsed it relentlessly at home over the past several days. Delivery wasn't too bad, vocal range was OK, projection was OK although I did miss a few beats when the dancers did something unexpected. I have to spent some time with the recording to see if it was something I called inaccurately/inappropriately/untimely/inaudibly or if it was actually a dancer (or two) who simply goof the call. In any case, it wasn't catastrophic and a quick repair during the bridge fixed everything.
In the third figure, I had a minor epiphany about my singing calls. Actually two epiphanies: the first was that my mental process for sighting the resolution & delivering the calls isn't the same process for recalling & delivering the lyrics. Switching between mental modes takes a half-second too long and it blows my timing. The second epiphany was that having a mid-singer epiphany is itself rather bad timing and cost me another half-second. Doh.
I'm not sure now how to smooth out the mental context switching but further rehearsing a number as well as more practice with pre-programmed modules may help. I'll try week of practice to see what happens.
Next Tuesday, it'll be the Kent & Brian show at club night as Dayle & family are heading to San Diego for 10 days' vacation. Oh boy! More opportunity to experiment with new material! :-)
