Tidbits from dances #1

Yesterday night Midnight Squares had Richard Tuck call C3A. It was a great, pretty fast pace and seemed to be about the right level for the floor, where we mostly got stuff but sometimes went over sequences.

One call that stuck out was, from a quarter tag with the centers in a wave: initially concentric relay the shadow. We ends just kind of stood there until someone had the presence of mind to give some brief directions ("step to a wave around the outside" or something like that). Very cool application of concentric!

Distortion and naming: a brief complaint

Sometimes - and perhaps more often than I'd like - I'll make a mistake and still be really sure I'm correct. Sometimes I'll even insist on this dancing this mistake the second time around! One of these instances happened the other day when we were in an O with ends facing centers and the call was percolate. I'm used to doing percolate from an eight chain, but I (and probably most dancers) am more familiar and comfortable with doing it from generalized lines. And so, in my end position of the O, I went ahead and tried to do a big block percolate instead of an O percolate. I was so confused when no one else seemed to be going as far as I was, as I thought I had to get all the way to the other end of the O! After two attempts, someone said something about columns, and I realized what I was doing.

Isn't it odd that (at C3A anyway) we have three names for distorted column-like setups and only one for line-like setups when 1) we condense the setup into one term (i.e. not counting "{disconnected, distorted, offset, magic} {lines, columns}")? Stagger, butterfly, and O all mean columns, while only big block means lines. Does this continue to be true at higher levels or does it even out? I'd prefer some other syntax, like "(in your) {staggered, butterfly, O} {columns, lines}" (and getting rid of the term "big block" altogether). Parallelogram and (at C3B) trapezoid seem to be in a class of their own, because they by themselves can refer to either columns or lines but the setups are not ambiguous between them.