Re: [Tower Ravens] AGM

Hi everyone, As I won't be able to make the AGM tomorrow I thought I'd send some comments and discussion points in advance. My opinions are in red and my suggestions for extra discussion points are in blue. Hope these are helpful and that you have a fun evening. Ffion x Nov 2012 11:16:37 +0000 Chadwick <rachel.chadwick(a)cantab.net team(a)towerravens.org.uk [Tower Ravens] AGM <CAM6MhRhUWxoMX1MDpqNutosskmwoXcDoo=WHvCG8C0jPYd258Q(a)mail.gmail.com text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" We are in the process of putting together the agenda for our first ever AGM! As I said last Monday, the AGM will be on Monday 19th November, in the Wetherspoon's, instead of practice - we'll start promptly at 8pm. I think I will try and get there earlier for dinner, so do join me if you want. Here's a first outline. Do email if you want to add things / have opinions / etc. I realise a couple of people can't make it, so that just makes it more important that those people can express their views on the email list first. 1. APOLOGIES Me! I’m very sorry but I can’t be there as it’s the evening of The Reading Agency’s 10th anniversary lecture. As I’ve been organising it and need to be there to try and tactfully extract money out of wealthy attendees there’s no way I can get out of it L 2. SECOND DANCE: Do we want one? If so, should it be more complicated than the current one (i.e. one "beginners" and one more advanced), where the more complex one could be a potential DERT dance (see point 3) or a traditional dance. Or should we just stick to one dance? I say yes to a second dance – when you’re doing something like Thrales day or a day time tour at a festival it’s good form to be able to do two different dances. I wouldn’t be in favour of a trad dance as our current dance features bits from most trad ones so they’d look too similar (unless we did Beadnell which is a bit dull or Merton in which everything is backward and therefore mega confusing). Another negative about trad dances is that others will do them – if we write our own it’s almost guaranteed to be unique. I think a second dance should either be more complex (and therefore suitable for DERT) or a more open, slower and beautiful one with little stepping (suitable for dancing outside on a Morris style crawl when you have to dance on concrete or flagstone but have a nice open space to play with). If the second dance was a slow, beautiful one we’d probably want to increase the complexity of the first one for DERT. I think it would be nice for everyone to bring the names / shapes of figures they’ve seen and liked at workshops, dance outs like Thrales day and youtube (if, like me, you’re sad enough to spend your lunch breaks watching rapper online!) to a practice and we could start to build another dance that way. It would be important not to forget about the first dance in the process of putting together a new dance as dance 1 will still be our default dance for some time so practices would have to be carefully managed between perfecting dance 1 and creating dance 2. 2a. CHARACTER: I don’t think we can continue leaning on Simon for ever. The character can be an integral part of the team – Clive goes to all Thrales practices and you don’t see them out without him - so this might be a good time to discuss how we’d like our character(s) to act and fit in with the team. In an ideal world do we want one, two or none? Male or female? What kit would they wear? Do we want to use the traditional calling on song / adapt it / create something new? Should it be one of us so we can incorporate stepping and 6 / 7 sword locks or someone external? My personal view is that it would be good to have a woman who isn’t necessarily already part of the team and who is confident, fun and can commit to coming to a few practices now and then to develop a routine that fits well with the dance. No idea where to start looking for that person though! The minimum you need is someone to announce to the crowd who you are and what you’re going to do. This can be someone in the team who’s about to dance but that’s not ideal. 3. DERT: are we interested in going in 2013? If so, what should we dance? I think we should go to DERT 2013; it’s fun, you see lots of other teams and therefore get more ideas about how you want to dance and make new friends, you spread the word about the team, and you get useful feedback from the judges. Working towards a competition is good for focussing the team on standardising style and perfecting technique and gives you something very definite to aim for. I think the standard we’re dancing at now plus another 4ish months of practice means we definitely wouldn’t embarrass ourselves. One option to consider is going as a display only team which means you get to take part but don’t get judged. Personally though I think we should just go for it and enter properly. A potential negative to bear in mind for your discussion is that, again, practices have to be carefully managed in the run up to DERT – not everyone will be able to make the event so there’s a fine balancing act between making sure your DERT team are on top form and giving everyone a chance at taking part in and enjoying practices. 4. REGULARITY OF TOURS / DANCEOUTS: Do we want to have a monthly tour? Should we have one before Christmas? I think we should definitely have them regularly. A least once every two months but not more than once a month so perhaps once every 6 weeks. We might prefer to say every x Friday of the month or we might want to set a new date for each crawl in case that offers people more flexibility. I think it would be nice to have one before Christmas but the date would have to be set very soon to make sure enough of us are available. 5. TREASURER'S REPORT / SUBS: Announcement of current bank balance. Discussion of potential ways to change subs - we're currently losing money on the hall each week, which isn't really sustainable in the long term. A monthly subscription rather than weekly? (This has the benefit of people being able to do electronic transfer or standing order.) Update on cost of kit and how much we owe someone for it? I’m happy to do a Standing Order. 6. INSURANCE / JOINING OPEN MORRIS / THE FEDERATION: Which one do we want to join? For either, the subscription for the year goes in in January. (For those of you who don't know, these are both national organisations who provide insurance for folk dance teams - insurance which we should probably have and currently don't!) Don’t have much opinion on this. As far as I know the Fed is bigger but I had a quick look through the open morris’ list of members and they seem to have a lot of the younger female teams e.g. silver flame, rapper rascals. Don’t know if there’s any particular reason for this. 7. ELECTIONS: Positions up for grabs are listed below. I think the only real limitation is that the Practice Organiser, Secretary and Treasurer all ought to be different people, as those jobs require a good deal of work each. 8. AOB Positions for elections: 1. PRACTICE ORGANISER: Runs weekly Monday practices, decides what's going to happen each Monday. Can delegate teaching etc. as she sees fit, but is in overall charge. I’d like to stand for this position. I’ve been dancing and watching rapper for about 7 years and I’ve danced with 4 teams in all positions. I therefore know lots of figures and stepping variations but, more importantly, I know that there are many ways you can dance the same figure e.g. there are at least 3 different swordhandling styles for single guard. I think this knowledge will really help as we develop from being a team which knows how to get through a dance into a team which looks precise, snappy and confident whilst dancing. I’ve had some very good rapper teachers so I also know exercises and techniques to improve precision within the team. If there’s anything I love more than rapper dancing it’s seeing other people get better at rapper dancing; I really enjoyed hearing people say ‘oh I get it now’ or ‘I didn’t actually realise I was supposed to be doing X on beat X until you pointed it out just then’ when Lindsey asked me to help teach and critique some figures a few weeks ago. If I were practice organiser I’d try and listen to everyone’s opinions about how they thought the dances were looking (I’d try and bring my camera regularly to video us as I think seeing yourself dance from outside the set is a great way of improving), what they wanted to work more on and I’d hope to be able to put together our new dance in a democratic and collaborative way. 2. SECRETARY: Responds to email requests as they come in to the info@email address. Keeps a record of who has signed up to what. Chases people on a Monday to sign up to things if necessary. 3. TREASURER: Fairly self explanatory! Collecting subs and paying the church are the two main things. Keeping money in order generally. Happy to stand for this is no other takers but equally happy for someone else to do it! 4. TOUR ORGANISER: If we do have regular tours (which we should) this person would make sure that somebody is organising each one - liaising with pubs to make sure it's ok. They can (and should) delegate each tour to a different person. 5. WARDROBE MISTRESS: Keeps the spare fabric left over from making the kit. Organises getting new kit sewn up for newbies / kit replaced as necessary. Doesn't have to do all the sewing herself! 6. WEBSITE / EMAIL: Keeps the tech-y side of things up to date and looking smart. 7. CAKE MONITOR: Makes sure somebody is making cake for each Monday! Don’t mind doing this but it sounded as if there’d be stiff competition for this position at practice last week so happy for someone more passionate about cake to do it! Please note that none of these roles are do-it-all yourself - they can (and should!) involve some delegating. Also, none of them (with the possible exception of Practice Organiser) are roles in which the person in question needs to be an experienced rapper dancer. And apart from the three main ones, people can have more than one! Other possible roles which I'm not sure whether they are worth having include: hall liaison (to correspond specifically with St Michael's - Lindsey's currently been doing this) and publicity officer (we should probably have a facebook page, etc. which they can keep up to date). Bag woman / sword fairy: responsible for looking after the swords (making sure they’re cleaned after every use) and bringing them to practices and dance outs. Crawl roles: In addition to organising the route of the crawl in advance there needs to be someone in charge of going to the bar and asking for the music to be turned off, someone (can be the same) to keep an eye on the time and give 5 minute calls when it’s time to leave, and someone deciding who is dancing. NB. Often a squire / foreman / leader / captain is the bag man, chair of ‘business’ during practice break and of AGM and EGMs, main decision maker (e.g. if a festival needs a quick decision on a booking), tour organiser (as described in Rachel’s notes above) and does some of the crawl roles I’ve just mentioned. The suggested role of Practice Organiser here combines some of the foreman roles with teacher but this is often separate. In fact all of the teams I’ve previously dances with (as well as Thrales) have separate roles for foreman and teachers; worth considering whether we want to split like this or do it our own way. Musician: Just a reminder that Nicky said she’s happy to have co-musicians If there is anything on either of these lists which you think I have forgotten, please email the list and add it on. If you have any comments on any of the AGM points and want to get the ball rolling now, please do! Otherwise, I shall see you all soon! Thanks for getting to the bottom of this, Rachel :)