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SCVSDA General Dance Program

List Comparisons

A chart that shows how various "smaller than Plus" lists relate to each other can be seen at:

[list comparison chart]

This is just the regular online calls-taught display with the various complete lists in place of actual classes.

The first "abc-all" column represents the calls included in the full ABC three-dance cycle. The next two are simply the two existing CALLERLAB sub-Plus programs. The next two represent two different versions of the ACA "one floor" list -- the one that they were promoting in 2005 and the one that they just published this year. The "rgvca2005" column represents the "Club Level 50" developed by the Rio Grande Valley Callers Association. The "bcwcsd" column represents the "West Coast Square Dancing" program being used by some clubs in British Columbia. The "ecto" column represents the "Experimental Condensed Teaching Order" developed by a CALLERLAB "Ad Hoc" committee in 2013.

At the bottom are statistics that show the "fraction of Plus" computed in two different ways -- by the number of lines of this chart, and by the number of CALLERLAB call "numbers" (counting them fractionally where only some of the elements of one "family" or some of the cases of one "call" are included). Neither of these is necessarily a good direct measure of the total amount of "learning" involved (or the related question of teaching time required) -- there are too many differences among calls and the way we typically group them in listing and teaching them, to expect any simple statistic to totally capture that. But they are useful ways to consider the relative sizes of the various lists.

Also note that for the alternative (non-CALLERLAB) lists what you are really seeing is an interpretation of how they map onto the breakdown of the CALLERLAB lists as used in our call-taught database. Because of the way these other organizations have presented their lists, it was necessary to make guesses about whether they really intended to include certain calls/cases. So some of the details of the differences, both among the various alternative lists and between any of them and Basic or Mainstream, may not be exactly right. But this doesn't necessarily matter much for our purposes right now, since we won't necessarily want to be using any of these lists exactly as is. (But if we do, we could then ask for clarification from their designers/promoters.) The main purpose of looking at lists like these at this point is to see what kinds of differences other people have considered might be useful in constructing an alternative list.

Based on this chart, ABC could be reasonably described as about "1/3 of the way" to Basic. The old ACA list is roughly the same size as Mainstream, which is consistent with its history -- their objective was to create something that could be taught in about the same time as Mainstream but which they hoped would be accepted by dancers/callers who were currently using Plus. As this chart shows clearly, the tradeoff they made in trying to accomplish this consisted entirely of dropping things from the Basic portion of the sequence, in order to make room for some "popular" Plus call -- they did not drop anything from the Mainstream (calls 52-68) portion. We can also see that with their latest version they did succeed in making their list significantly smaller -- and that to accomplish that they had to cut out even more of Basic and did drop two items from the Mainstream portion (as well as reconsidering their choices about which Plus calls to include).

The RGV "Club Level 50" list is smaller, overall, than the ACA list, but not as small as the ECTO. It doesn't include any Plus calls at all, presumably because it was intended as a faster (to teach) alternative to Mainstream. It is bigger than ECTO primarily because it doesn't cut out as many Basic calls. It leaves out approximately the same number of calls from the Mainstream portion, though not the same ones.

The BC "West Coast Square Dancing" list is smaller than both the RGV and ACA lists. It is almost as small as ECTO, and in terms of the total number of calls they have a similar mix of Basic and Mainstream, but they seem to have a slightly different orientation. According to the developer of this list, calls were selected largely on the basis of their usage in singing calls. The ECTO list seems to have more "building block" type calls.

The ECTO was created by an "ad hoc committee" appointed by outgoing CALLERLAB Chairman Elmer Sheffield. Althought this supposedly came out of the same CALLERLAB/ACA joint discussions that presumably resulted in the new ACA list, it's significantly different. Perhaps what happened was they did talk, did agree on certain things, but ultimately couldn't agree on the big picture, so they each ended up publishing their own list. Even being fairly generous in the interpretation of exactly what ECTO is intended to include, the ECTO is significantly smaller than the new ACA list -- smaller even, by both of the measures calculated by the online calls-taught system, than Basic. This is consistent with the sorts of uses they say they have in mind for it, which in many ways are similar to what we are doing. But unlike the ACA list (and in common with the "Club Level 50" and "West Coast Square Dancing" lists), it makes no attempt to be a substitute for Plus. It includes only one Plus call (Single Circle to a Wave, which is also included in the recent ACA list -- apparently they considered it a natural extension of "Circle" and also a good substitute for Box the Gnat.) These two things are of course related -- a good part of the reason the list is smaller is that it doesn't include any other Plus calls. But this ECTO also leaves out about half the Mainstream (52-68) calls, as well as a few more things from the Basic (1-51) portion.

For some insight into how frequently the calls in these various lists are actually used in our area, see Keith Ferguson's charts.