Square Dance History Project
The rich story of North American square dance finally has a home in the digital age.

Browse Items (69 total)

  • Collection: Historical squares
Moving Image

Cotillon

French dancing masters in the early 18th century created a dance for two couples called the cotillon. This morphed into the cotillion and later became the quadrille. The opening minutes of this… View item
Moving Image

Les Lanciers de Quebec - Quebec Lancers

This video illustrates the first two figures of a Quebecois version of the Lancers Quadrille, danced at the Ralph Page Dance Legacy Weekend in January, 2009. The tune and the name for the first figure… View item
Moving Image

La Strasbourgoise Cotillion -Regency era

Demonstration of a period cotillion at a Napoleonic Ball View item
Document

"Social Dancing in America" - Rod LaFarge

This lengthy history of social dance was written by Rod LaFarge and appeared over three years in American Squares magazine. LaFarge begins with a short look at English country dance, moves to dancing… View item
Document

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 item
Moving Image

Lancers, 5th figure - Wayside Inn, 1932

This home movie is one of eight reels filmed in the 1930s at the Wayside Inn, Sudbury, MA. (More information about these films is available here.) The Inn at the time was owned by Henry Ford. Ford had… View item
Document

Les Quatre Berceaux - related documents

This item gathers together various documents related to the videotaped performance of the dance, Les Quatre Berceaux:• Instructions, as interpreted and explained by John Ramsay with assistance… View item
Moving Image

Les Quatre Berceaux - cotillion for 6 couples

“Les Quatre Berceaux” (The Four Cradles) was presented by Dance Discovery at the Missouri History Museum in conjunction with an exhibit on Napoleon. The group reconstructed the dance from… View item
Sound

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 item
Still Image

Description of a Quadrille, 1870, West Virginia

Satirical description of a quadrille, from a West Virginia newspaper; no mention is made of a caller View item
Website

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 item
Moving 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 item