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Spent the day in Sacramento dancing C4. My brain is full! The style here is "throw the baby into the river and see if she learns to swim". I think a few more weeks of this and I will really see some RAPID progress. Fortunately I have managed to avoid getting badly frustrated, which is a feat for me :-). I don't like to be bad at things, and this method of learning is... well, if I'm not making constant mistakes, the stuff isn't difficult enough.
I AM making progress though. Definitely. It is amazing to watch. Things I didn't know before, I can now do with ease. The human brain is such a strange and fascinating thing!
Had an errand at OSH and got there THREE MINUTES after closing. Sigh. Tomorrow. Now, time to finish cleaning up the family room. A good third of it's already done.
I AM making progress though. Definitely. It is amazing to watch. Things I didn't know before, I can now do with ease. The human brain is such a strange and fascinating thing!
Had an errand at OSH and got there THREE MINUTES after closing. Sigh. Tomorrow. Now, time to finish cleaning up the family room. A good third of it's already done.
no subject
C4 is a part of "Modern Western Square Dance" -- if you've heard of "Mainstream" or "Plus" square dances, those are MWSD. Unlike contra, you learn a specific list of calls before showing up. (Right and left thru, which I believe appears also in contra, is one of the basic moves in mwsd also.) The Mainstream list has some, oh, I don't know, sixty or so calls on it, and once you know those you can dance at any Mainstream dance in the world without additional learning required.
If you really like learning more stuff, well, the call lists are hierarchical. "Plus" is a superset of Mainstream; it has all the Mainstream calls plus a bunch of new ones. After Plus, you can learn the Advanced levels: A1 and A2 (each with about ninety new calls). Then there's Challenge: C1, C2, C3A, C3B (C3 got split into two because it was so big). Each of these has on the order of ninety new calls as well.
Thrown in there are increasing numbers of "concepts" -- call-modifiers. "As Couples" means to keep hold of the person beside you, act as a single unit, and do the call as if you were one dancer. They get a LOT more complicated. Some of them have technical white papers written about them.
C4 is the last Challenge level. Unlike everything else, this list contains anything that's not on the others -- a total of maybe five or six HUNDRED new calls and concepts. Learning this one is a major undertaking, not just because it's so big, but because you can't really go to any dances to practice some of the calls until you've learned all of them. This workshop in Sacramento is a big help because we have a few people who need practice and some experienced people who are willing to dance with us losers, so I can practice before I'm done memorizing.
There, that's the long form of the explanation! :-)
no subject
I'm guessing that it's difficult to get enough people together in one dance hall to have a C4 level dance. Even people such as yourself who are not yet 'quite' there are still going to be a small portion of the overall mwsd community.
It also tells me you're probably a dance goddess. Do you dance other styles? I've been going to English Country Dances just about every week since last April, and have gotten to the point where I'm just about ready to try calling. Somewhere along the line I realized that people had started looking at me as an experienced and competent dancer instead of a newbie. It's an interesting experience. I imagine you've had it about five times over to get to where you are now.
Tonight I'm going to a Vintage Dance that's held every other Sunday night. Nice group of folks - mostly fen - who dance there. I hope to get some more practice with the Tango tonight, as well as some other stuff.
no subject
Yes, C4 dancers are pretty rare. There are a few hotbeds of activity: the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Chicago, New England/New York, one group in Florida, and Japan. That's just about it. In those areas, you can get a square together pretty easily. Anywhere else, it better be a special event. BUT for special events, C4 dancers will travel... anywhere. Rob and I are going to Sweden in October.
Do you dance other styles?
Used to -- wish I had more time! I have some experience with the various ballroom dances, I know just enough Texas two-step to get myself in big trouble, I've done a very little bit of country line dancing, and I have danced contra a grand total of once so far. I want to learn Morris, various folk dances, Scottish, Irish, belly dance... I even want to learn the Russian(?) sword dances. About the only thing I've never much wanted to try is tap. And probably round dancing. Ballroom wherein even the guys don't get to think? nah.
Sounds like you do English Country, contra, and some amount of partner-dancing (tango). What else?
Somewhere along the line I realized that people had started looking at me as an experienced and competent dancer instead of a newbie. It's an interesting experience.
That it is! For me I think the shift in people's views happened sort of gradually, but the realization of it came to me all of a sudden one day. Ding, you are now seen as clueful.
Tonight I'm going to a Vintage Dance that's held every other Sunday night.
What's Vintage? Do you do dance forms of hundreds of years ago, like the quadrille and the minuet? Does it include group dances, line, partner, single? I wanna hear more! :-)
no subject
That's about it as dance forms go. My mother's attempts to get me adept in Irish step dancing when I was a wee lad were largely wasted, though I can still do a bit of it. I did the free form 'interpretive' dance that was ubiquitous for High School dances in the early 70's. One free Arthur Murray dance lesson. That pretty well covers it.
My interest in the longways set dances began with a Regency Ball at DarkoverCon. I liked the dances, and after several years of saying I ought to go to the Monday night English Country Dance practices here in Baltimore, Rivka finally convinced me to go with her back in April. I went to precisely one Contra dance since then, last July, in a church hall that was not air conditioned. It was an ... experience.
> What's Vintage?
Dances from US culture of the 1890's through 1930's. It includes all the animal dances that were variations of the one-step, like fox-trot and pony-trot and turkey-trot. It's very similar to ballroom, but with more lighthearted practitioners. The group I dance with is a subset of the Baltimore Folk Music Society, and while we have some real dance gods and goddesses in the group, the emphasis is more on having fun than anything else. Let's see... other than the one-step variations we have tangos and waltzes and some latin (rumba, cha-cha, samba) stuff. Some swing dances get tossed in there too, even though that's pushing the late edge of 'vintage.'
In fact, I didn't go to that vintage dance last night, because I had a balky spacecraft keeping me busy. I hope to have better luck with the English Country Dance tonight.
no subject
What's "longways set dance" mean? (As I show my cluelessness! grin!) Sort of like contra, where there are lines interacting with each other in a specific pattern?
I went to precisely one Contra dance since then, last July, in a church hall that was not air conditioned. It was an ... experience.
Yah. Contra without air conditioning sounds pretty awful to me. People who like contra often tell me how enjoyable the energetic, social, flirtatious aspect of it is. Me, I don't wanna do both "energetic" and "flirtatious" when it's too hot!
other than the one-step variations we have tangos and waltzes and some latin (rumba, cha-cha, samba) stuff. Some swing dances get tossed in there too, even though that's pushing the late edge of 'vintage.'
All of this stuff is familiar to me from (what I have always called) "ballroom". On the other hand, sometimes people get very puzzled when I mention, say, swing and ballroom in the same sentence. Maybe ballroom really means Thou Shalt Waltz And Only Waltz, and all the rest of the stuff I did was 'vintage'! :-)
no subject
Yes, contra is one type of longways set. All the contra dances I've seen have been duple minor longways sets. What makes them 'contra' is that the first couple reverse positions at the beginning of the dance. In classic longways dances, all the men are on the right as viewed from the head of the hall, and all the women on the left. That's called 'proper.' When the men are on the left and women on the right, that's 'improper.' If the arrangement is staggered, with alternating couples proper and improper, that's contra. (American contra is a subset of French contre, BTW, with emphasis on fast and simple dances.)
Duple minor means that you dance once through the 32 or 64 measures of the dance with one couple, and at the end you've 'progressed' so that now you're dancing with a new couple. These are also 'hands four' dances. A triple minor is a variant of this where the 2's and 3's move up the line taking turns being 2's or 3's, until they finally get to the head of the line and become 1's.
There are also fixed 3 couple set dances, where you just dance with those other two couples for the entire dance. There's also Confesse (2 men, 4 women), a fun little dance the directions of which look like stage directions for a bi-poly orgy. Then there are 4 couple set dances, some of which are longways and some squares. But the longways minor dances are popular because they can be danced by "as many as will."
For the flirtatiousness, I find ECD preferable to contra. The slightly slower music gives you more time to practice the lowered eyelash trick, and the quirked brow, and the winning smile.
As far as the difference between vintage and ballroom dance goes, what I've been told by the experts (which I'm not) is that ballroom is a derivative set of the older dances, stylized for country club events and suchlike after WW II. All I can say with certainty is that I like the vintage dance people a whole lot more than people I've met who go on about dancing ballroom. For me, it's a matter of the difference between snobs and folks who dance to have fun. I think there are some actual differences too - like which way a waltzing couple rotates - but mostly it seems to be attitude.