strathspey@strathspey.org:43895

Anselm Lingnau

Re: Workshops and walkthroughs . . .

Jan. 28, 2006, 2 a.m. (Message 43895, in reply to message 43890)

Ron Mackey wrote:

> 	We see from Anselm's mail that there is a practise before the
> Frankfurt Ball and that seems reasonable but if there is a great demand
> for such a thing before a normal large dance with guests coming from
> afar then it seems that the programme needs to be examined.

When I started dancing, the Frankfurt ball used to be feared for its eclectic 
collections of weird and wonderful dances (some of which were fairly 
obscure). Note that we're talking German programmes here, which are already 
more eclectic than those found in, say, Scotland.

We have worked very hard over the last decade or so to get rid of this image, 
but the pre-ball afternoon mini-workshop (or what you might call it) has 
stuck with us even though our programmes are now on the simple side of what 
is usual hereabouts. Even so many dancers welcome it as a chance to try the 
two or three more challenging bits that we sneak in the programme, and many 
of the people who come to the ball are ones who for professional reasons or 
other find themselves unable to attend our (or any) weekly class, so are glad 
of a refresher. The third reason is that, having taken upon themselves the 
inconvenience of travel, people come to the afternoon session not because 
they are desperate for a last-minute brush-up but simply because they want to 
get as much dancing out of the weekend as possible.

The turnout in the afternoon is usually a third or half the number of people 
who attend in the evening, which proves both that there is reasonable demand 
for the afternoon session, and that many people find it feasible to come for 
the evening *without* the extra tuition in the afternoon.

> Larger affairs should confine themselves to more
> universally known and popular dances and the number of these is
> rapidly growing so choice should not be too limiting.

On our ball programmes we try for a sensible mixture of well-known and 
not-so-well-known-but-straightforward (i.e., fairly obvious from diagrams, 
which many people use for teaching even though they oughtn't) dances. Usually 
at least the last third of the programme is from the well-known-RSCDS and 
nearly-canonical-non-RSCDS repertoire, so people can let their hair down 
towards the end of the evening. It turns out that some of the more unusual 
dances that we have put on our programmes then show up on other subsequent 
programmes, so while there is no official set of favourites it appears that 
people like them and take them home, at least for a while.

Anselm
-- 
Anselm Lingnau, Frankfurt, Germany ..................... xxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxx.xxx
Software engineering as a field is a lot like psychology as a field.  That is,
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