Sponsors
At this time, six organizations are cooperating in this project. The first four are providing financial backing and the other two are assisting in other ways:
- Country Dance and Song Society
- Square Dance resources
- Bob Dalsemer, West Virginia Square Dances
- Ted Sannella, Calling Traditional New England Squares
- CALLERLAB – The International Association of Square Dance Callers
- The Lloyd Shaw Foundation
- The American Dance Circle magazine online
- Traditional Square Dance Figures
- Recordings available for download
- ARTS-dance: Alliance of Round, Traditional and Square-Dance
- Square Dance Foundation of New England
- 1960s era live recordings
- Bob Brundage interviews with square dance callers
This links to the transcriptions; also available on the site are the audio files. Be patient; the site is slow to load. - Additional on-line resources
- University of New Hampshire, Special Collections
Helping guide this project is a group of experienced dance callers plus scholars, archivists, and digital specialists at the University of New Hampshire. All the dance consultants participated in Dare To Be Square at the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, NC; this major square dance event (November 18-20, 2011) showcased a wide variety of squares: New England, southern Appalachian, traditional western, modern, and singing squares. That weekend attracted 70 dancers—three-quarters of whom were callers!—from around the country. With CDSS financial support for videotaping the event, 100 video clips from Dare To Be Square have been made available. Additional funding supported videotaping at Fall Berkshires C4 Weekend in Lenox, MA in 2011 and West Virginia caller Bill Ohse at another Dare To Be Square weekend in Riner, Virginia, in spring of 2012. Footage from both events is part of this site’s digital library.
Over the past two years, we have been searching archives and collections throughout North America. If you have or know of good movie footage that shows square dancing, please contact us at davidmillstone7@gmail.com with more specific information.