Dancing a tip

A tip is the unit of dancing: one record's worth, or one continuous stretch of live calling. Knowing what is coming makes it much less alarming, so here is a tip from the inside.

Tips, the unit of the dance explains what the parts are called and why a tip comes home. This page is about what it feels like to be standing in the square while one happens.

The opener

The music starts and the caller says something easy. Usually it is a circle, or a Forward and Back, or an Allemande Left into a promenade. Sometimes it is a Grand Square.

The opener exists to get four couples moving together. Nothing in it is difficult, and nothing in it is a trap. Dance it, find the beat, and use the time to look round the square: who is on your left, who has the outside hand, and where your corner is standing.

By the end of the opener you are back in the squared set, facing in, exactly where you started. That is not luck. The opener is a zero, and the whole tip is built out of zeroes.

The figure, four times

Then the main figure starts. If it is a singing call, you will dance the same figure four times, once with each couple leading.

The first time through is the hardest, because you are hearing it for the first time. Do not try to memorise it. Dance each call as it comes, and trust the figure to bring you back.

The second time is easier, and the third time something odd happens: your feet start to know where they are going before the call arrives. You are not reciting the figure. You are recognising a shape you have already been in twice.

Each repeat finishes where the last one started, so the next couple can take the lead. If you lose your place on the third repeat, the cure is the same as on the first: look at the square, find the shape, and join it.

The break

The break is a breather, and it is usually simpler than the figure. That is deliberate: it gives the caller somewhere to go if the figure has not landed, gives the dancers a rest, and keeps the tip from being one long unbroken stretch of new material.

Dance the break at the same pace as everything else. Dancers who relax in the break often arrive at the next call a beat late.

The closer

The closer winds the tip down, and it is built from calls you know well. It is not the place for anything new, and it is not the place to show off. It is the place to put the square back into shape so the finale works.

The finale

Almost every tip ends the same way:

Allemande Left
Right and Left Grand
Promenade Home

You take your corner by the left forearm, walk the grand right and left past every dancer in the square, meet your partner in the middle, and promenade her home. The music usually ends within a bar or two of the last promenade step.

The finale is the same in almost every tip you will ever dance, which is why it is worth learning early and well. When you hear the Allemande Left, everything after it is a path you have walked hundreds of times.

What to notice

Three things separate a dancer who is comfortable in a tip from one who is not:

• They are ready before the call. In a wave, their free hand is already offered.
• They look at the square, not at the caller. The caller is providing information; the square is providing the answer.
• They finish every call. Half a call leaves the next one impossible.

None of that is technique. It is attention, and it is the whole of the skill at this level.

Next

• the calls you will meet in a tip → Call index
• practising a tip you keep getting wrong → How to practise