Watching the animations
Every call in this book that can be shown moving has a player on its page: a picture of the floor seen from above, with a bar of controls under it.
The controls
There is one animation per call, and it is this one — nothing is repeated further down the page.
| Button | What it does |
|---|---|
| ⏮ | jump to the starting setup — where everyone stands before the call |
| ⏪ | step back a quarter of a beat |
| ▶ / ⏸ | play, and pause |
| ⏩ | step forward a quarter of a beat |
| ⏭ | jump to the ending setup — where everyone should finish |
Between the buttons is a slider carrying the whole call. Drag it and the dancers move with your hand: the picture is worked out for the exact point you have dragged to, so there is no smearing and no guessing what happens between frames. That is the point of the whole thing — if you lose your place in a class, you can drag back until the picture matches what you remember, and see precisely where you went wrong.
At the right is a speed choice: 1/4, 1/2 or full. The player starts at half speed, which is close to a caller walking a call through. Full speed is the tempo you will meet it at in a hall — 128 beats a minute — and it is worth watching a call at full speed once you think you know it, because that is the only way to find out whether you really do.
A tip that saves time. Learn a call from the ending setup backwards. Press ⏭, look at
where everyone ends up, then step back a beat at a time with ⏪. Dancers who know the finish
rarely get lost in the middle.
The floor
The faint grid behind the dancers is the floor, drawn one unit per square. Dancers stand about two units apart in a squared set or a wave, and one unit apart in a tidal wave or a promenade — and a dancer is drawn one square wide, so the spacing can be read off the grid itself. The same grid is used on the small formation diagrams, so a formation there and the same formation mid-call here are drawn to the same measure.
The colours
The dancers are drawn as two shapes, so that nothing depends on colour alone:
| Shape | Dancer |
|---|---|
| circle | a Girl — the dancer who squared up on the right of a couple |
| square | a Boy — the dancer who squared up on the left of a couple |
The dark wedge on each dancer is the direction that dancer is facing — read it as a beak, and the dancer is looking that way. It is drawn in near-black rather than in the dancer's own colour so that it reads at a glance against both the coloured body and the pale floor. Where two dancers come very close, a wedge can be hidden behind the neighbour it points at; that is the picture being honest about one dancer being in front of another. A thick grey line between two dancers is a joined handhold, drawn only across the gap between the two bodies, so it never reads as a pair of very long arms. The faint coloured trail behind a dancer is where that dancer has already been during this call.
The colour of a dancer is the couple they started in:
| Colour | Couple |
|---|---|
| red | couple 1 |
| blue | couple 2 |
| green | couple 3 |
| gold | couple 4 |
The numbers
A number inside a dancer is that dancer's home position in the square, which is also the number you will hear called at you:
| Position | Dancer |
|---|---|
| 1 | the Boy of the south couple (the couple nearest you, as you look at the picture) |
| 2 | the Girl of the south couple |
| 3 | the Boy of the west couple |
| 4 | the Girl of the west couple |
| 5 | the Boy of the north couple |
| 6 | the Girl of the north couple |
| 7 | the Boy of the east couple |
| 8 | the Girl of the east couple |
So numbers run anticlockwise from the south couple, and the south couple is 1 and 2. Every "Number 3" or "the number eights" you hear from a caller refers to this table.
Numbers appear only when the call begins from a full squared set. Where it begins from anything smaller — half a square, facing couples, a single wave — there is no home position to number, so no number is shown, and the colours fall back to gender. That is not a missing feature: a diagram that numbered half a square would be telling you something that is not true. The conventions page explains the rule.
If the player does not appear
The player needs the site to be served over http or https, not opened as a file from your own disk. Open from the site address and it will run; open the raw file and the book will tell you so rather than showing you a blank box.
Taking it with you
The site can be installed like an app — from your browser's menu, choose Install or Add to Home Screen. Once installed it opens in its own window, works on a phone or a tablet, and keeps working without a signal: the whole book, and every call you can watch, are stored on the device. That is the version to take to a class, or to a dance weekend with unreliable wifi.
Where to go next
- Animations index — every call you can watch, and the few with none yet.
- Conventions — how the call card and the pictures are laid out.
- Sources and attribution — where the definitions come from.