Club Resources
- Preparing a club night or half-night
- Halls and Date Planner
- External resources that are useful
- Advertising
- Dance Popularity Counts
Preparing a club night or half-night
Be a Master of Ceremonies. members are encouraged to become an MC for a night or half night. This page aims to provide the vital backup support. The information is also in the folder ‘MC’ available at an evening. Please tell us of anything you'd like or might help others to prepare.
Actually running the JVC Portogram which plays the CDs can be a bit daunting. Not using the remote is normally easier, someone will set it up and show you how to select a track and play it - it’s just like a normal CD player. But if you want to do something more complicated here are:
JVC Portogram - Details on playing CDs using the remote controller.
The following files list the dance music available from the club.
If you are choosing music for a dance where we don't have something specific, or you don't like our music for it, then music for a not too popular dance with broadly similar movements on the same bars is a good choice. The music can suggest setting in place or the hop when starting to travel or the movement in a circle for instance. Or just try out a couple of tracks from the 'Music by type' list. Except for the most popular ones, the link between the dances and their music is nowhere near as fixed as the lists here suggest and many people would be hard pressed to tell the difference between a reel and a jig.
Club Music for Dances (223Kbyte) in alphabetic order with CD with track number. Some of the CDs are copies of our tapes. Includes notes (ticks) and local popularity ratings. The 'Hard' field is a start at an attempt at rating the difficulty of the dances - you might prefer to get Napier’s Index! (see Dance Difficulty)
Music and popular dances by type (235Kbyte) They are arranged by type of dance, then number of times trough and bars. The ticked tracks are ones Douglas thinks are particularly good. This can be useful when choosing music for dances.
Popular Dances (259Kbyte) Dances listed in decreasing order of popularity whether we have the music or not. The popularity is biased to the local area (20 miles around Bracknell) and recent times with some finger in the air weightings. Green ones are ones which seem to be getting more popular. The figures are occurrences out of 2000 so they correspond to the percentage chance of a dance being in a 20 dance programme.
Halls and Date Planner
- Local Halls used for Scottish Dancing
- What it says on the tin. Also an exercise in using Google Maps :)
- RSCDS Berks/Hants/Surrey Border Branch - Forward Planner
- Local Groups should use the BHS planner to avoid conflicts.
External resources that are useful
- Grand Chain: Hints and Tips.
- Info on running an evening.
- The Strathspey Server: Useful Hints
- Useful documents about Scottish country dancing, including notes on planning a dance program and a guide to briefings.
- Minicrib: Dance Cribs.
- Over 3000 at the last count. The download contains a Word document - you can get a version with all the cribs in plain or else the later version that uses macros to generate a dance programme.
- Featured Dances
- Every year the RSCDS selects some dances it encourages clubs to put in their programmes.
- DanceData home page
- This is a comprehensive database of Scottish Country dances. You can access it online at The Dance Data web interface on the Strathspey server. It can be downloaded and used in read-only mode for free. For a very modest fee you can keep your own details in it. I am making the names and descriptions in our music list compatible with this.
- Popular dances. Compiled by Dianna Shipman.
- Dances in popularity order in the two years to August 2000.
- The Surbiton Dances - Last Year and Next Week
- I used this list from the Surbiton and District Caledonian Society to give a more recent and local bent to the list of popular dances from Dianna Shipman in the list ‘Music for Dances’ above.
Advertising
The telephone number has been obscured in any demonstration advertising material.
The club logo 1160x1160 as a GIF file (40kb).
See the 2005 ‘Reel Fun’ flyer
See the 2006 ‘Left Hands Across’ flyer
Dance Popularity Counts
This list gives an estimate of the popularity of dances both locally and in the South-East of England region. Take the hard value with a big pinch of salt especially for the low popularity dances! Most of this is automatically generated from the emails of the SCD dance list from Summer Tuesdays and email-a-programme.
Popularity of Dances in the South East (172Kbyte)
The popularity is under Local and Global and sorted in descending order for global. Local means BHS with a portion from the global list. Global means local dances plus programmes from the dance list. The popularity is out of 2000. Strange figure but it means basically the figures are how often as a percentage you would expect the dance in a 20 dance programme. The red and green colours are an estimate of whether the dance is getting more popular or less. Another pinch of salt! You can load the file into a spreadsheet if you want to sort the columns differently
The lists here gives how many times each dance was in a ball or ceilidh programme in the local area (approx 20 miles from Bracknell) in the season. Our dance popularity table for M/Cs uses this to bias the ‘global’ data above.
Dances in Local Programmes 2007-2008 (49Kbyte)
Dances in Local Programmes 2006-2007 (49Kbyte)
Dances in Local Programmes 2005-2006 (54Kbyte)