The glamorous life of a square dance caller

[cjsmith]

Writing good hard C4 choreography is slow. I keep forgetting HOW slow; perhaps I block it out of my memory.

My next big weekend is coming up in early March. I need two sessions, which will easily be sixty hours of work. I should have started in on this in January. I knew that. I even planned for that. My job intervened. (Yes, there's a lesson in there for me.) Sadly, this isn't the sort of task that's amenable to one big concentrated push. Trying to do too much at once is mind-numbing. However, it's got to be done. Rob said it well: it's like NaNoWriMo except the stuff has to be good.

The caller fee for this dance doesn't cover my airfare, much less the two days I'll have to take off work, so it would be very amusing to me to figure out just how much money I am "making" per hour writing this choreography. Negative five bucks? :-)

Comments

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

It's surprisingly difficult to pin down an answer to that question. It makes the dancers think -- at the C4 square dance level, the "puzzle solving" is a major part of the fun -- and yet the movements also go together smoothly so that the physical dancing part is fun to do. It's not repetitive, either mentally or physically. A motion that is short to do is also short for me to say so they aren't waiting for me to quit blabbing. It doesn't spin anybody around in place too much and cause dizziness. Nobody's standing still for too long.

Getting the "puzzle solving" part to be challenging enough but not too difficult is what takes the time for me. I can make the movements flow without working too hard, but I'm not necessarily engaging their brains. This group I'm about to go call for wants their brains worked.

The prep time is the work, for me, and the fun calling time is the reward. In three weeks I'll be all burbly and cheerful about how enjoyable this dance is! :-)