Joe Lewis - Callers Class

This is a fragment of a callers' class led by Joe Lewis; unfortunately, we do not know the location or the date. Lewis comments, "When a lot of people suddenly do the same thing wrong, the caller did it." He focuses a lot of this session on problems of timing the delivery of calls: "If you can't see the timing errors in a singing call and try to see what you can do to correct them, you're not a caller. You're a 'Mary had a little lamb' poetry reciter."

Lewis demonstrate examples of poorly scripted calls that do not give dancers enough time to complete figures, and he shows how he would make up rhymes to correct the timing. The session mixes talking with examples of his calling to the assembled dancers. He shows how a series of different calls can produce the same choreographic results while keeping dancers excited by the variety.

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