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

Browse Items (1930 total)

Still Image

Ted Glabach - photographs

Three photographs of Vermont farmer and dance caller Ted Glabach, taken by Steve Green, plus one photo (from his scrapbook) of Glabach as a younger dancer. View item
Website

Square and Contra Dance Posters

A collection of 43 flyers and posters collected by Steve Green that advertise contra and square dance events in northwestern Massachusetts, southwest New Hampshire, and southeast Vermont dating from… View item
Sound

Uncle Steve's Quadrille (recording)

The first audo file contains instructions for the dance; it is followed by two music files with calls for the first and second figures.Detailed information about this dance, as published in Elizabeth… View item
Document

Uncle Steve's Quadrille (description)

This dance was published in Elizabeth Burchenal's Folk-Dances from Old Homelands (1922). This is the first dance iin the book, one of two American dances, along with Old Dan Tucker. (See the moving… View item
Website

Stan Winchester - C4 Singing Squares

Stan Winchester was a MWSD dancer who created a large body of singing squares for the C4 community. These dancers sometimes share a series of recorded audiotapes with prerecorded calls, and Winchester… View item
Document

Hand position in MWSD

The formation of CALLERLAB in 1974 established definitions and helped modern square dancing become more standardized. This does not mean that everything fell neatly into place! The cover illustration… View item
Document

Square Dancing Standard and Experimental Guidelines

A flood of new calls in the early 1970s led a group called Square Dance Systems to publish a catalogue of calls, an attempt to bring order to an increasingly-complex universe of new figures. Square… View item
Moving Image

Phil Jamison 4 - Cecil Sharp and the "running set"

Phil discusses the origins of the term "running set," going back to when the English folklorist and collector Cecil Sharp first encountered southern Appalachian dancing.For a demonstration of the… View item
Moving Image

Phil Jamison 3 - The caller's role in Southern squares

The square dance caller in Southern dance traditions plays a somewhat different role than his Northern counterpart. Phil looks at the way a Southern caller improvises and uses basic figures in… View item
Moving Image

Jim Mayo 6 - Key Elements of Modern Square Dance

Jim discusses features that make modern square dancing different from traditional squares, including the unpredictable nature of the calls, the necessity for lessons, and the club structure that… View item
Moving Image

Jim Mayo 5 - Basic Formations, Complex Calls

Jim points out that there are only a few basic formations in modern square dancing. One of the distinctive features of modern squares is the way that a series of basic moves are combined into one… View item
Moving Image

Jim Mayo 4 - New choreography

New calls such as Wheel and Deal and Swing Thru gave modern square dance callers powerful tools for creating new choreography and patterns of movement. Callers discovered that the sequence "Wheel… View item