strathspey@strathspey.org:44505

Jim Healy

Intros and recaps (was Taking the floor)

March 6, 2006, 9:54 a.m. (Message 44505)

Greetings!

Doug Schneider’s post and subsequent clarification raises a couple of 
points.

As I always understood it, the main purpose of the eight (or four) bar intro 
was to alert the dancers to the change of tempo from the previous dance and 
give them a feel for the new tempo as they made up sets. The point that has 
been made elsewhere is that, until relatively recently, there were no recaps 
at all. The order was: band intro, MC calls for ‘missing’ couples and 
confirms sets made up, all dance. The introduction of recaps, lengthening 
the time between the intro and the actual start of dancing, suggests that a 
re-think of when the ‘intro’ is played, perhaps along the lines Doug 
suggests, could prove useful.

The second point (from the clarification of the difference in Doug’s 
terminology between recap and brief) points up a growing trend that, in my 
view, needs to be stopped. Recaps or whatever you want to call them should 
be brief! I now flee the room whenever Quarries’ Jig (an excellent dance) is 
on the programme because the ‘brief’ tends to take longer than the dance. 
Doug’s suggestion that not only should there be a full length talk through, 
as one would find in a full dance description, followed by what seems to me 
to be a recap, fills me with horror – all that dancing time wasted. Given 
the number of dances on programmes today, recaps are necessary and here to 
stay: turning social events into classes is not.

Jim Healy
Perth and Monaco