C4 last night

[cjsmith]

Danced to Mike Jacobs last night. Good research: I'm splitting a weekend with him in March.

Note to Self: do not EVER, EVER use "follow the yellow brick road". Once in an evening is enough for that hideous call, and Mike actually LIKES it, so I better make sure to call it zero times during my half of the dance. Negative one or two would be even better.

Note to Self: dancing eight tips is one too many for my feet the way they are. It may in fact be more than one too many. Maybe it was eight too many, for all I know.

Comments

[hopeforyou.livejournal.com]

I think you can do the "follow the yellow brick road" call on occasion...but I'd highly recommend inhaling helium before you do it. Either the formation falls apart laughing or you do, at least, if you get tired of it.

Content-free reply

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I LOVE your icon!

[tytso.livejournal.com]

Not being a C4 dancer (or any kind of square dancer, really), I'm curious what makes "follow the yellow brick road" so uh, special...

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

You do nothing but turn around and around and... The call is aptly named, for those who recall the very beginning of the Yellow Brick Road in the Wizard of Oz: a tight spiral.

In contra, that might be a fine thing. I think contra dancers are physiologically immune to dizziness. In square dancing, it's considered to be bad form -- almost rude -- to have dancers keep going around in one direction for a long time.

[tytso.livejournal.com]

Well, in contra dance, most of the calls that involve constant spinning do so at a constant G force (i.e., a contra dance balance and swing for eight measures); you're spinning in time to music at a constant angular velocity, so as long as you look at something which isn't moving with respect to your inertial frame of reference (for example, like your partner, or your partner's eyes :-), it doesn't any kind of dizzyness -- really!

Hmm... I'm reminded about trying to tell Stacey how I didn't get dizzy while being subjected to acrobatics in a small aircraft, since "down" was more or less constant, at least for some maneauvers. Somehow it's less pursuasive when you're trying to tell someone in words...

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

so as long as you look at something which isn't moving with respect to your inertial frame of reference (for example, like your partner, or your partner's eyes :-),

Interesting. I'm having trouble believing that looking at one thing that's spinning with me would make me nondizzy. The fluid in the ears is still doing something it would never otherwise do, right? I can get dizzy with my eyes shut, for example. In fact, that might be faster for me than with my eyes open looking at things go past me -- with the visual cue AGREEING with what my inner ear tells me, my body might be willing to accept the input for a longer time before rebelling. But I admit I've never tried this. Interesting mental experiment, thinking about this without doing.

Of course, actually doing it has a psychological hurdle for me. Not long after I developed physically, I learned a lot of things not to do, and one of them is that I don't gaze into a guy's eyes unless I am willing to do a lot more.

[tytso.livejournal.com]

There used to be an old amusement part ride where everyone got into a large cylindrical room with rubberized walls, and everyone lined up in a circle facing inward, with their backs to the wall. The room would then start spinning, faster, and faster, until the centrifugal force exerted so much force that their backs were pushed against the rubberized wall.... and then the bottom would drop out of the floor, leaving people stuck to the wall only due to the centripedal force.

The same thing happens if you're spinning in a tight circle. As far as your inner ear is concerned, when you're spinning very rapidly, the only thing you feel is a constant pull outwards due to the spinning, as if you were laying down on the ground. That's why staring at something which is spinning along with you is so helpful. In the amusement part ride, if you stare straight across the spinning room, you're fine, because your inner ear doesn't feel any sense of spinning other than the initial acceleration when the room started up. But if you look up at the roof, which is in spinning, you will get dizzy, because your eyes tell you are spinning even though your inner ear doesn't feel things that way.

As far as the implications of looking into someone else's eyes, I suppose one of the appeals of contra dancing is that there isn't any meaning associated with it, or at least not much more than light-hearted flirting. (It's only for 4 or 8 bars of music, tops, after all, and afterards you're gazing into someone else's eyes; no real room for misunderstasnding.) I can understand though why some people might be uncomfortable with that, given that in many other contexts it can lead to really bad misunderstrandings that could cause major ugliness.