Browse Items (69 total)
- Collection: Historical squares
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Windmill Lancers / Windmill Quadrille
Caller Don Armstrong provides the instruction and prompts the figures in this Retrospective Session from the 2000 Ralph Page Dance Legacy Weekend, held at the University of New Hampshire. The Windmill… View itemSound
Sammy Spring's Quadrille - Don Armstrong
This dance, presented by Don Armstrong at the 1955 Minnesota State Square Dance Convention, comes from the calling of Sammy Spring. Don remarks in his introduction that the dance is similar to one of… View itemDocument
Polonaise - Grand March
This is a detailed look at the history of the Polonaise, known in the US as the Grand March. Thee name "polonaise" speaks to Polish roots. The author cites a 1685 description of the dance,… View itemSound
Grand Square - Edson Cole
This dance starts with the Grand Square figure, along with other calls common to the 5th figure of the Lancers.Edson Cole was a fiddler and dancing master from Freedom, NH. He was documentedby Eloise… View itemMoving Image
Frank Chavez Describes American Square Dances and Spanish Cuadrillas in New Mexico
From childhood, 70-year old fiddler Frank Chavez was exposed to New Mexico Spanish folk music, growing up west of Estancia in New Mexico. Frank was a guitar player and then in 1990, after meeting Ken… View itemWebsite
Square Dancing in the 1800s
Fred Feild is a long-time caller and square dance enthusiast; now living in Tucson, he was instrumental in creating the Chicago Barn Dance Company in the mid-1970s. In recent years, he has started… View itemWebsite
Square Dance, Oakland, CA - 1919
This silent newsreel footage from Gaumont News, a French company, shows several sets of dancers doing a quadrille in an outdoor setting. The brief title before the action reads: "Choose… View itemDocument
Emergence and Development of the Cotillon
Jean-Michel Guilcher is a pre-eminent scholar of French dance. This is an excerpt from his book, La contredanse: un tournant dans l'histoire française de la danse, translated for the Square… View itemDocument
The Afro-American Transformation of European Set Dances and Dance Suites
Scholarly article that looks at the way that European set dances such as the quadrille became changed by African Americans. The article looks in detail at the quadrille tradition in the Caribbean… View item
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