San Diego, CA

September 6, 2013

Band: Old Twine String Band

(Martha Wild, JoAnn Koppany, Drew Leavens, Jeff Bratt)


  Dance Name Author Variants/comments
1 Hypnosis Melanie Axel-Lute  
2 Rollin' and Tumblin' Cis Hinkle  
3 The Second Time Around Jim Kitch  
4 Vous-Rendez Me A1: Circle left 3/4, swing
5 Trip to Lambertville Steve Zakon-Anderson Give-and-take in B1
Promenade in B2
6 Xenotransplantation Me Square
7 Heather's Cookie Martha Wild  
Break
8 Third of July Tom Hinds  
9 Pell-Mell Reel Gene Hubert Mirror do-si-do replaced with mirror gypsy
10 Walk the Walk Bob Isaacs  
11 Forward Up Six and Six Fall Back Traditional Square
12 Melanie's Triplet Melanie Axel-Lute Triplet

A rough evening, teaching-wise. And the floor was too often too choppy. A hot evening too, inside the hall, as it hadn't been ventilated, and we leaked dancers badly in the second half.

"Trip to Lambertville" went down in the first half, because one couple in the midst of newcomers added an extra half allemande to the men's allemande, swung the wrong people, ended up in the wrong side, and panicked, trashing the hands fours. (The "give-and-take", substituted in to reduce the number of allemandes, didn't help anything.) I didn't realize what happened till after I stopped the music and reset everything.

I walked the square mixer once for the heads, and once for the sides. Then in the real dance, when I called it HHSS, one of the squares froze in panic, because they were expecting sides to do something. Eventually I had them swing someone -- anyone -- but it was an interesting lesson in contra expectations not applying to squares.

After "Third of July" went smoothly with the half-figure eight, I assumed "Pell-Mell Reel" would also go well. Nope. The mirror gypsy threw everyone -- I really needed to demo that carefully. People did right-shoulder gypsies, tried to be in the same place when they switched from ones to twos, and did gypsies once and a half around. So the A1 turned into flailing around, though at least the dance cleaned things up by the neighbor swing. I've gotten too used to the ECD crowd, and their familiarity with mirror back-to-backs and gypsies.

Back to the main page.