2024 November Newsletter
CANE COUNTRY SQUARES NEWSLETTER
NOVEMBER 22, 2024
2024 Summary
The end of the year is almost here. I feel the year has gone fast and we have almost reached Christmas.
This year has been great and we have certainly had a great mixture of events. One of my favourite moments is we have 7 new dancers joining our groups and it's fantastic to have new blood.
I hope everyone has enjoyed their dancing in 2024 and had alot of fun. Make sure you rest up over Christmas and we look forward to
seeing you in 2025.
Welcome 2023/2024 Graduates
Our 2023/2024 graduates with all their smiles. It's fantastic to have Laura, Adrian, Mia, Cinnamon, Karen, Di and Trevor finish the SSD program. Congratulations to you all!
Well, we did forget one person. We had a special visit from Colleen this week and we did, get to surprise her with a certificate of her own. Colleen has completed the SSD program with Cane Country Squares this year and it is fantastic to be able to acknowledge this!
Well done Colleen!
Square Dance Tips
1. When ever you are unsure, just keep dancing. The worst thing you can do is just stop and say your lost. Keep moving is the best thing. You can always fix your square when you get back home.
2. Another tip is when squaring up, walk around a square and never through it. Walking around is a part of our dancing etiquette.
3. Use loose hand grips. When you have strong hand grips, this does not help the dancers in your square. You cannot move quickly between movements. Try to use loose hand holds at all times. It will make the dancing experience better for all.
Changes for 2025
With a new year coming, we wanted to share some changes happening for 2025.
Door Entry Fee
The Club committee are raising the door entry for 2025 to $8. We have been through our finances and we feel we need to raise this to help cover costs more.
Tuesday and Friday Classes
The club committee have discussed at many meetings this year about making some changes to help our retention of new dancers while trying to increase dance time. We have taken onboard some feedback from our dancers through out 2024 and we are looking to trial something different for the first half of 2025.
We would like our Tuesday nights to be Learners with full SSD.
To achieve this, we would need to increase the night to a 2.5hr night.
By doing this, we know our beginners can come on a Tuesday night and therefore once finished the program, they can just dance on the same night they learnt on.
The goal is they won't need to transition to a new night and they can enjoy the full level while also helping any beginners we have come through.
We hope that over time, this will help the problem of getting enough angels each Tuesday night as it will be it's own standalone night.
We will be running this night like our Fridays and therefore will be having theme nights so all dancers get to enjoy the fun.
We would like Friday nights to be our Mainstream and Plus night.
This will give more dance time to our mainstream and plus dancers. This will allow these dancers to gain more knowledge and experience by having more dancing time.
From looking at these changes, we are hoping you can see what we are looking to achieve.
We want to grow the club! We don't want our experience dancers to not get their dancing time too!
We are hoping you can see we are listening to your feedback and the committee hopes these changes will be positive.
While we could stay with status quo, if we don't have a go, we won't know the results.
Proposed Dance Program Changes
For those dancers who may be not aware, CallerLab is our international body that has standardised square dancing across the globe. They have been active for 50 years and they are passionate about keeping our activity alive.
Our current program structure has been in place for around 40 years and they are now proposing the largest change in that period.
It's being called "The Proposal". Across the world, there are 5 different programs/ways to teach beginners.
The current CallerLab executive would like to perform a reset on that in hope this will assist the growth of square dancing moving forward.
The SSD program that we have been using for many years has shaken up the world and many clubs are using it. Some of the advantages are: - approx 12-14 week learner program, a bible for new callers on everything to teach and a program that can be taught twice to three times in a year.
CallerLab are proposing to change the entry level program name from Basis to Mainstream. It will be a capped at a maximum of 50 movements exactly like our SSD program.
From there they will delete the old Mainstream program and the new Plus program will be minimum of 50 movements.
Any movements that don't make it into the new mainstream program will be sent up to the new plus program to make up the 50 movements.
If this proposal is successfully endorsed by CallerLab members, for our club, our SSD dancers may need to learn a few movements to comply with the new mainstream program but that will be easy to achieve.
Our full Plus dancers may also need to learn a few movements to comply with the new program.
Our full Mainstream dancers will have two options, drop back to the new Mainstream program or learn the extra 30ish movements to comply with the new plus level.
I won't lie, for some dancers, these additional 30 movements will be difficult and you will need to think hard about if you will be able to cope with the complexity of those movements.
It's ok to say Plus is too hard and you are happy where you are.
I know many dancers that are happy in Mainstream and have no interest in learning Plus.
The voting on the proposal will happen around April 2025 for CallerLab members.
