Caller's Compendium

Perform mode

Perform mode is the app's stage-ready calling view. This guide covers calling a single dance or a whole program, sizing the text so it is readable from a distance, moving through your evening, keeping time, and making changes on the fly without losing your place.

Finding your way around these words. On-screen buttons and screens are written in bold — like Perform this dance and Perform this program. The first time a dance term appears it links to the Glossary, so you can get a plain-language definition without losing your place.

New to the app? Start with the Getting started guide.

Enter Perform mode

Perform mode is not a navigation tab — you step into it when it is time to call, and step back out deliberately when you are done. It fills the whole screen.

  • To call a single dance, open it from your collection and choose Perform this dance.
  • To call a whole evening, open a program and choose Perform this program. You can also reach it from the program summary.

When you exit, the app takes you back to wherever you came from.

Wireframe sketch of Perform mode: a full-screen, dark, high-contrast dance card with very large text, large previous and next arrows at the screen edges, a slot indicator, and controls to swap an alternate, jump to a slot, adjust, or exit. This is a low-fidelity layout sketch, not the finished app.

Wireframe sketch of Perform mode, showing a full-screen dark card with very large text, edge next and previous arrows, a slot indicator, and adjust and exit controls

Read the card

Perform mode shows one dance at a time in very large type, with the figures grouped by section (A1, A2, B1, B2) and set in a typeface built to be read from a distance.

Your dialect is applied, so the card speaks in your words. A one-tap toggle flips the current card between your dialect and the neutral, shared wording — handy if a dancer or another caller asks about a figure — and flips right back without losing your place. Figure detail you recorded shows here too: when a swing ends facing somewhere other than the usual "in"/across — up or down the hall, or out of the set — the card notes that ending so you can cue it.

Set the stage

A row of controls along the top shapes the calling view itself. On a tablet or a desktop they all sit there as buttons. On a phone, only the Stage theme toggle stays out — the rest tuck into a More actions menu so the toolbar can't crowd a narrow screen. Wherever a control lives it does the same thing, and every toggle says which state it is in rather than relying on how it looks.

Stage theme. Perform opens on a high-contrast dark-stage theme by default, built for strong legibility (a contrast ratio of at least 7 to 1) under stage lighting. Toggle it off to fall back to your usual app theme. Its tooltip reads Stage theme on — tap to use app theme or Stage theme off — tap for dark stage, so there is no guessing, and it stays where you put it — next time too.

Auto-size text to screen. Out of the box this is on: the card scales so the current dance's full text fits the screen without scrolling, recomputing whenever you move to a new dance or slot, rotate the device, or resize the window. So the text is always as large as it can be while still fitting. It starts however you set Auto-size Perform cards in Settings › General, and the in-view toggle flips it for the night.

A− and A+. The Decrease text size and Increase text size controls step the size down and up, starting large with no upper limit. Using either one switches auto-size off, because you have just told the app what size you want — and that size is remembered for next time.

Show canonical terms. Flips the card between your dialect and the shared wording without changing your active dialect, and is remembered too. It appears only when you are using a dialect other than the shared wording. See Dialect.

Tap tempo opens the metronome sheet, and Show walkthrough — which appears when the dance has a walkthrough written — overlays it on the card.

The screen stays awake

While you are in Perform mode, the app keeps the screen awake, so a propped-up tablet will not dim or sleep partway through a dance. The moment you exit, the screen is free to sleep as normal again.

Move through a program

When you are performing a program, step through your slots with whichever control suits you and your setup:

  • the big next and previous controls;
  • the giant edge hit zones at the screen edges, easy to hit without looking; or
  • the arrow keys or page keys on a keyboard.

A jump-to-slot overview lets you jump anywhere in the program at once — useful if plans change mid-evening. And when a slot has an alt, one tap swaps it in place of the primary.

Keep time through the evening

For a program, Perform mode shows timing in a status area so you can pace yourself:

  • a running program clock for the whole evening;
  • a per-slot elapsed timer that resets each time you move to a new slot;
  • a slot's planned length shown as "planned N min," with a gentle cue when you run past it; and
  • a pause/resume control for interruptions.

Timing is display-only — it helps you keep an eye on the clock but never changes your program or your dances.

Adjust on the fly

Calling a program. Plans change mid-gig. Adjust program opens a sheet that lets you make changes without disturbing the card you are reading. From it you can:

  • reorder the remaining slots (with a drag handle or move up / move down buttons);
  • insert a dance from a quick search;
  • add an ad-hoc note; and
  • mark the current slot performed.

An inserted dance and an ad-hoc note both land right after the current slot, so "play this next" is one action away. Every change is undoable, and for a saved program the changes persist. Marking a slot performed is what feeds a dance's calling history — see Programs & matrix.

This sheet belongs to program Perform. Performing a single dance has nothing to reorder, so it has no adjust sheet.

Screen readers and verbose figures

For screen-reader users, Perform mode always announces each figure in an expanded, spoken-friendly form — clearer to hear than the terse text shown on the card. You don't need to turn anything on for that; it is how Perform always behaves.

The Always show verbose figure text setting is a different thing: it puts that fuller wording on screen in the dance view, not in Perform. The Accessibility guide covers this and the app's other accessibility options.

Leaving Perform

Choose Exit performance view and the app checks first:

Exit Perform? — Leave the performance view? Your place and the running clock are kept, so you can resume where you left off.

Keep performing returns you to the card; Exit leaves. Because your place and your clock are kept, stepping out to check something is safe.

You do not have to be on stage to hand someone a dance. From a dance's detail view you can export or print a single dance card as a PDF or as shareable text, and the export follows your active dialect. See Share, print & export.

Where to go next

Not sure what a word means? The Glossary has plain definitions for every term used across these guides.