strathspey@strathspey.org:69478

Anselm Lingnau

Re: FW: FW: small favor: Arthur's Seat 31-32

Feb. 26, 2018, 8:30 p.m. (Message 69478, in reply to message 69471)

Eric Ferguson wrote:

> I propose that the RSCDS could ask one of its committees to act as "advice
> centre" on how to resolve these unclear texts.

Speaking entirely for myself and certainly not the RSCDS, I'd say that this is 
unlikely to happen, for at least two reasons:

1. As a rule, the Society doesn't deal with dances that haven't been published
   by the Society. This is not to say that the Society doesn't acknowledge
   that such dances exist and can be fun and/or instructive – it's just that
   it would open endless political cans of worms that the Society, on the
   whole, would prefer to remain closed.

2. There is a general tendency even within the Society to move towards less,
   rather than more, prescriptivism. As you know, I happen to be in charge of
   the committee that publishes RSCDS dance books (for another 9 months,
   anyway), and we have had extensive discussions over how to deal with the
   seemingly unavoidable ambiguities and omissions in our dance descriptions.
   We acknowledge that too much regulation tends to stifle the enjoyment of
   our dances, and that while there should be enough detail and clarity in
   RSCDS dance descriptions to enable people to figure out how to do a dance
   from the written word alone, in many cases if there is an ambiguity there
   are several ways to resolve that ambiguity that can coexist without causing
   immediate catastrophe, and we do not need to pounce on one particular
   method and declare that the only officially sanctioned one.
  
   Much of the bad reputation that the Society has in some circles (especially
   in Scotland) is less to do with its insistence that people strive for
   excellence in their dancing (which is not a Bad Thing) and more with a
   perceived notion that the Society is all about Right vs. Wrong. While
   people generally enjoy being right, it can really put a damper on the fun
   you're having if you're constantly being told that you're wrong, and so we
   would very much like for there to be less of that, please. Adding further
   detail to dance descriptions will clearly be helpful to some people, but to
   other people it will just afford more opportunities to be told that they're
   wrong, wrong, wrong, and this is not really something we would like to
   encourage.

   So whether you do a turn right hand or a petronella turn at the end of
   Arthur's Seat is a definite issue mostly if you're training a high-powered
   display team which is going to perform in front of a bunch of famous
   people who all learned Arthur's Seat from Jack McConachie himself. If, as
   it will be for most of us, you are not in that particular situation, and
   there is no RSCDS Technical Advisory Panel to take recourse to, then you
   listen to your teacher or MC and do whatever they tell you to do (it
   might be something in X's class today and something else at Y's social next
   week, but that is hardly the end of the world). If you yourself happen to
   be the teacher or MC, you pick one and/or tell people that there are two
   choices and let them pick one or try both (they have two tries after all).
   Huge deal.

Having said that, if people would like to empanel a committee to pronounce on 
that sort of thing for non-RSCDS dances (assuming that the RSCDS TAP is there 
to take care of RSCDS dances), no power in the 'Verse can stop you from 
rolling your own (if you don't think you're qualified, try to find some 
qualified people and incentivise them suitably to take part). If your 
committee's rulings are reasonable then people – at least those people who are 
interested in committee rulings on details of dances – will probably accept 
them. And in most cases it's not as if anyone really knew better, anyway.

Anselm
(again, NOT speaking for the Society)
-- 
Anselm Lingnau, Mainz, Germany ......................... xxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxx.xxx
Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window.          -- Steve Wozniak