Self-teaching levels

Over the course of two sets of about three months each, a year or so apart, I learned C3A and C3B on my own: zero formal instruction, and very little informal instruction. Having been reasonably successful in these endeavors, I thought I would share some of my thoughts, advice, and resources for dancers teaching themselves new levels.

Before embarking on this entry, I'd like to say that I advocate strongly for learning levels through formal classes with several students, rather than on one's own (but why I feel that would should be its own entry here!). However for various reasons, not everyone learns every level that way.

Have experiences you'd like to share? I'd love to hear about them by blog comment, social media, or email.

Self-teaching "prerequisites"

There are some qualities I think successful self-teaching dancers most likely have, so dancers considering it may want to assess their amounts of these qualities before attempting their first level.

• Square dance "maturity"

I know there are people who have somehow even learned mainstream on their own, but it's far more probable that this process will work if the learner has some "maturity" in square dancing. It's hard to define what this should entail, but I think at least: ability to read definitions and map them to physical actions; ability to read formations and scale them to how they look in real life; ability to mentally follow at least one dancer through a call; the "concept" (ha) of what a concept is (perhaps through computer science/math background even without having learned Advanced, as there are certainly analogues there).

• Excellent memory

This one's probably obvious, but the first step for many people/levels will be to memorize the definitions of the calls (or some method for mapping call name to physical action, if not the actual definition). Resources are only becoming more readily available, so teach tapes / drill sequences that add calls over time may exist, but it's still necessary to have a memory such that you don't need people helping to perform the calls. The fastest self-teaching method, sometimes called "powertooling", has memorization of all the calls as its first (and sometimes only) step.

• Dedication

This one's probably obvious too! Self-teaching can be exhilarating and fun, but it requires a lot of patience and desire to learn the level to put in enough time. To be fair, the powertooling approach (memorization but little to no practice) requires less time as long as you have the memorization skills and confidence to dance a level based solely on knowing the definitions.

Possible journeys

Most people I talk to about self-teaching see the following path of two steps:

• Beginning: memorize the definitions
• End: try to go to a dance or get a caller to call simple stuff for a square that includes you.

I see two potential intermediate steps (one, or both in either order):

• studying with written choreography
• studying with spoken choreography

If these are available to you and the level you're studying, I think they're great for building confidence, skill, and the easy paging-in of calls that real level dancers have. Of course if you are truly learning by  yourself, it's difficult to use choreography to study! Square dancing is a team activity, and suffers when you try to do it alone. However if you have dedication and enough skill at dancing and scrambling, it's possible. (My third-of-a-studio kitchen turned into a dance hall for awhile!)

In my personal experience, I used only written choreography for C3A (plus maybe watching a few youtube videos), while I used written choreography and then a lot of drill spoken choreography for C3B. I felt significantly more confident before my first C3B dance, though this could have been partially due to having gone the self-teaching route before. I think I performed relatively better at C3B as well, but the difference was probably not large.

Studying with written choreography

There's a good amount of written choreography on ceder.net (possibly elsewhere as well, but not that I've sought out). These are sequences filterable by level, "difficulty", and even by call. Some are full sequences, squared set to squared set, while some start and end at well-known intermediate formations (zero boxes and zero lines).

I would filter to the level I was learning and just go down the whole list imagining I was the couple 1 girl dancer and thinking through my end positions. It's basically impossible for me to be able to follow enough dancers that I can imagine crashes or funny calls or to always have the exact formation in my head, and in all cases I wanted to check that I was correct, so I would usually follow along in sd. Whenever I felt checking my position, I'd catch up sd by typing in each call, and then verify my current position. For easier sequences I could perform this check only a couple times during the sequence, or even just at the end, but for harder ones I'd type in each call after I thought about it. The easy sequences helped my memorization and paging in of calls, and the harder ones helped me check my deeper understanding. Want more practice? You can go through the material up to four times as different dancers. Of course the biggest problem with written choreography is the fact that none of it is in real time, which leads me to my next section.

Studying with spoken choreography

If you have access to spoken choreography, it can be a good aid for memorization and paging in calls fast enough, since it is at real speed or close to it (while you can still pause or repeat whenever you want). If you're studying alone you'll need to dance with seven phantoms, but being able to actually move in the patterns of the level is tremendously helpful. Even without the other people, you develop some muscle memory for the common cases. It can be extra fun because it gives you a little exercise and momentum, and you may even like the music!

Secret option C: when you have callers or experienced dancers helping along

Some people may have access to callers and dancing groups that will work with them for a tip every so often as they're learning. I did not do this (except one tip from a tape when I'd just about memorized C3A), but I suspect it would work similar to drill sequences except that it'd be more realistic in terms of teamwork and difficulty. I fall on the low end of confidence in a level I'm new at, especially if I've only been learning by myself, so this kind of education would probably be more stressful for me than it's worth. However for people who more readily believe that they're not burdening the dancers helping them, it sounds like a very useful option.

Concrete resources

Here are some relevant resources are available to everyone. I have used many of them at one time or another.

• Definitions
• Callerlab (through C3A) - official definitions
• ceder.net (through C3B) - in-depth definitions, some examples and discussion
• Taminations (through some C3B) - Callerlab definitions (except ceder for C3B) and animations of the calls from certain formations
• Bill Ackerman's books and other C4 definition sources (C4) (on Lynette's site)
• Written choreography
• ceder.net choreography (filter by level, goes through C4, amount varies)
• and to help, sd
• Spoken choreography
• Youtube videos of sequences/tips (all levels, quality varies wildly)
• Joe Dehn's channel
• my C3B playlist - most of my playlists are just a reorganization of Joe's great videos (which are primary separated by event, not level)
• my C4 playlist - see above
• Drill tips from Tony Collingwood (C3A and C3B, though there may also be plus tips on the site, and 2-couple dancing at many levels); this was my primary source of studying C3B other than the definition list, and I loved it
• Tapes from Keith Rubow (A2-C4, mostly C1-C4) - these are not free, but will be the best quality for the most realistic tips, and are not prohibitively expensive. If you know anyone who runs tape groups, they may also be willing to share some of the tapes in hopes that they will gain a talented dancer afterwards!
• Winchesters - challenge singing calls, almost all of which have some C4 calls you'd have to learn for the purpose of trying them out if you're not learning C4