pennsicdance: beginners/advanced classes

[Nadine Latief]

I'd like to add my support to Adele's idea of having advanced dancing 
between 6 pm and 8 pm at the dance tent. It's an unpopular enough slot that 
people won't be there unless they really want to.

Also, if the ball prep classes consistently run late, then maybe it should 
be made longer, and scheduled from 3 to 5 pm, perhaps even alternating 
teachers to not tire out one person.

 > As for raising the number of advanced dance classes, I'd check to see 
how well
 >attended the 2 advanced classes were attended this year.  I know the
 >advanced Bouffons had almost 24 students.  What was the other advanced class
 >that was taught and how many were there and how'd that go?

So I believe that was my Canary class. It had between 20 to 25 people!
And I was expecting 10. I thought people would self-select themselves out 
of Canarying, but apparently not.
I also wasn't explicit enough in the class description: I had said it was 
appropriate for people with 16th Century dance experience, but I guess it 
should have had the word "advanced" (with a lot of asterisks or something.).

I think the class went okay for something of that size and technical 
difficulty. I think it would have gone much better if I had only 10 people, 
and they all were experienced 16th century dancers. Negri's Il Canario 
variations is harder to immediately pick up, even for experienced dancers. 
With 20+ students, I didn't have enough time to give individual feedback. I 
ran out of time, and didn't even get to teach much non-Il Canario 
variations (wanted to do turning Campinellas!). However, later on at night 
I had a student that said he didn't knew the Canary before but now he felt 
he knew the basic structure. So it went through to at least one person :-)

Also, I think I offended at least one person because I wouldn't teach the 
combinations at the lower level she wanted. Sigh.

So next year, I figure I'll try to be more explicit in the title and 
description, expand it to 2 hours, and limit the class size to 10 or so.

Cheers,
Lowrie.