(from a discussion on rec.folk-dancing, August 1996)
Kathleen Fox:
I have recorded myself calling the dance (with cd's) and then played it back dancing the lady role and then the gent role by myself - It helps to pretend to be at the ends too - I have discovered many problems this way and a few dances I had to re-record many times before I got the timing down-this does not solve the teaching problem but it helps me to see pitfalls that need to be addressed.
Greg McKenzie:
When preparing your dance cards you might consider the following basic sequence of information in calls:
Identify to whom you are speaking
Identify with whom they will be dancing
Identify what figure they will be doing
This is the most effective order for calls and teaching. It is very often ignored these days to the detriment of the caller's success and the enjoyment of the dancers. If more callers followed this sequence walk-throughs would be shorter and callers could stop calling earlier. For example: "Balance and swing the next." should be "With the next, balance and swing." (Since you are speaking to everyone "all" is implied in this case.) I realize that this takes one extra sylable, but it's well worth it.
Bob Archer:
There have already been some very interesting comments in this thread, but I can't resist adding mine.
I call a lot of dances that I have never danced. This is because I call more than I dance these days (probably a Bad Thing but a different thread ) so most of my new dances come from books or from r.f-d [the news-group rec.folk-dancing].
My theory is that a caller can only call a dance well if they can mentally dance the dance from every position in the set simultaneously. My aim when preparing a dance is to reach that state of "enlightenment", then to make sufficient notes on a crib card that I can reach that state again quickly ( i.e. while the dancers are making up sets for the dance ).
Thinking about this some more, I don't actually prepare the call or the walkthrough explicitly, what I prepare is the crib card. A few of the things I want to know whilst preparing the dance ( and might well note on the card ) are:
Who are you dancing with at any point? E.g. men turn one and a half and swing on the side is much easier to do correctly if you know who it is you're swinging ( partner, neighbour, shadow etc. )
What direction do you need to be facing in to start or finish a move? - particularly important at the beginning of a hey or the end of a swing
What is the end position of each move? I find this to be particularly important with 'fractional' moves - how many people can count seven eighths of a hey?
Any additional information to help people orient themselves in a dance - identifying shadows, in one dance I can think of the men are facing their partner's back at one point.
Once I have a dance in my head, the actual words I use to describe the walkthrough or call the dance are fairly automatic ( this can mean automatically good or automatically bad ). I rarely specify the words I want to use for the walkthough or call on the crib card, the main exception to this is when I have found that a particular set of words gives me problems ( see Jim Saxe's list of confusing words for some examples of this ).
To try and summarise:
I translate the dance from the author's instructions into my own internal representation of the dance.
I write a crib card to help me reconstruct this internal representation.
When actually calling I translate my internal representation into a set of instructions that I hope the dancers will understand.
David Elek Kirchner:
As I rule, I tend to be highly suspicious of dances with serious complexity, and tend to avoid calling them if I haven't danced them. (And often definitely avoid calling them after I have danced them.)
Also, I'm not sure how much having seen a walkthrough or danced a dance influences the way I choose to teach and call a dance. I rarely decide to collect a dance during the walkthrough, and when I do I'm usually so intent on storing the figures in my short-term memory that I don't concentrate on how the caller is teaching it (with obvious hints like trail buddies excepted). When I prepare a dance, I have to keep in mind a number of things which aren't important when I'm dancing the dance (how to teach to the gender role I wasn't dancing, for example).
So to some extent, you should prepare a dance you haven't danced in the same way that you prepare a dance you have. Not that you're taking a careless attitude toward undanced dances, but that you take a serious attitude toward danced ones...