Why Have things Changed

Anselm Lingnau

Message 62414 · 17 Feb 2012 14:50:30 · Fixed-width font · Whole thread

Helen Brown wrote:

> We too have cribs available when the tickets are on sale and they are
> available on the branch website as well. When people come and still do
> not know the dance, I wonder if the problem is that we do not teach how to
> understand a crib and how to relate the words with what was taught in
> class last week.

Two thoughts:

– Reading a crib and translating that to actual choreography is an abstract
skill that not everybody possesses. I know many people who can handle
diagrams but won't touch textual cribs with a 10' pole.

– It may well be that the cribs are available but people simply don't bother
swotting up on dance events – they go there hoping that there will be recaps
or even walkthroughs and that they will pick up the dances then, that the
other people there will have done their homework and be able to shunt them
around, or they just believe that they are such wonderful dancers that
everything will turn out fine anyway (the Dunning-Kruger phenomenon).

It seems that one of the modern SCD world's greatest assets (the »living
tradition« leading to a large and increasing repertoire of dances) is at the
same time one of the greatest impediments to bringing back the »good old days«
when people knew the two dozen most popular dances by heart and could dance
them on the spur of the moment.

I must admit that as a teacher I try not to repeat dances week after week,
because my aim is to teach people dancing, not dances, and I try to provide a
varied menu of different dances to illustrate the things I want to teach. So
that makes me part of the problem. But if I had to repeat even half of last
week's list this week, that would eat into the time I have available to
actually teach new things. Furthermore, chances are that there will be people
in this week's class who either weren't physically present last week or else
don't have the memory to remember the *names* of last week's dances, let alone
their choreography, so it is not a matter of »we did this last week, here's a
recap and off you go«. I do publish lists of the dances I taught, together
with cribs from the database, so people can in theory sit down and go over
what they did in class – I don't know how many of them actually do but I try
at least to provide the opportunity. (What I do know is that when *I* started
out I made a point of trying to remember the dances I had learned, without the
benefit of a teacher doing the leg-work for me, and I have a bunch of
notebooks to prove it).

For our annual ball, we do publish crib sheets and diagrams well before the
event, and we offer a review class in the afternoon on the actual day.
However, we still get flak from people for not walking the dances through on
the night (we do recaps, though). Many other events here in Germany do exactly
that. It probably eats into our attendance. But the ball committee is quite
adamant about not walking through dances at our ball, and we'll probably be
the last function hereabouts to not do it. (A number of years ago some other
German group tried doing away with the recaps at their ball, and according to
what I heard – I wasn't actually there – that was an unmitigated disaster.)

Anselm
--
Anselm Lingnau, Mainz/Mayence, Germany ................. xxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxx.xxx
Egotist: A person more interested in himself than in me. -- Ambrose Bierce