Julia and I are in CA for LessOnline this weekend, and we're staying with friends. It happened that they were hosting a party, and while this is not a group of dancing friends they asked if I'd be up for leading some dancing. One of my hosts let me borrow their violin (which I'll also have with me today at LessOnline if anyone would like to jam some), and the space was small enough not to need any amplification.
Playing and calling at the same time is only something I can do if I play simple tunes I know very well while calling simple dances, and both my playing and calling suffer from the multitasking. But my hosts encouraged me not to worry about this and thought we'd have a good time. I think they were right!
We ended up having about seven couples, mostly adults, but also including about three kids 3y-5y who were very excited to dance. I made sure to choose dances that would work for the whole group, and it was definitely the right call to include the kids: their excitement was highly infectious.
Our hosts had moved furniture earlier in the day, clearing an open area about 15 ft square. This ended up being slightly tight for a few figures, but was mostly pretty good.
The crowd was enthusiastic about dancing, and while not everyone danced we easily had enough people to make the dances work. We ended up doing (I didn't write this down at the time; this is approximately right):
- Longways: The Low-backed Car
- Longways: Bridge of Athelone
- Waltz
- Longways: Jacob's Potato
- Scatter mixer: Sasha
- Circle: La Bastringue
- Waltz (Julia singing Waltzing With Bears while I fiddled chords)
- Longways: Galopede
I think Sasha was the most popular, followed by the set dancing (Longways and Circle), followed by waltzes. It makes sense that the waltzes were less popular: Julia and I taught the basic folk waltz step, but getting into the improvisational lead-follow dynamic and the kinds of figures you might want to lead would have needed much more time and have worse ROI. I'm not sure if I would include these if doing this again, though it was nice to have a few slower-paced dances.
I'm glad I was able to help make this happen!