WHAT IS SQUAREDANCING?

Almost everyone has seen a cowboy movie in which there was a dance. Someone picked up a fiddle and started a dance, but not an ordinary dance. He told the dancers how to move. This was the eldest form of square dancing.

Square dance is a modern country-dance style. To practice square dancing, you need to be with four couples, disposed around an imaginary square.They dance what the caller calls to them. The caller stays on the stage and calls figures on the beat off the music. The music is usually contemporary country music and the calls are given in English language.

The dancers should know all the figures the caller can use. There are 68 figures a caller can chose from. The caller is responsible for the choreography he is calling; the dancers don't have an idea what figure would come next. The dancers change their position many times during the dance, but at the end of the dance they are back on their starting position, that is the job of the caller.

Good callers always try to surprise the dancers with new and odd compilations, and that's what is keeping this dance alive.

A worldwide organisation the Callerlab maintains the list of figures used all over the world. It adds and removes figures. It means also that if you have learned to square dance you can dance it anywhere else.

The greatest award of the square dancing is friendship. We dance to meet friends and have fun.