Square Dance Day

What the day is

Square Dance Day is observed on November 29. Four couples form a square, and a caller tells them what to do next.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance itself is not documented. The dance has a well-traced history.

The form came out of European social dance, chiefly the English country dance and the French quadrille and cotillion. The quadrille supplied the square of four couples that gives the dance its name. Settlers carried these forms to North America, where they mixed, simplified and picked up local music.

The caller is the American addition, and it changed what the dance could do. With the figures called aloud, dancers no longer needed to have memorized a particular dance beforehand, which meant a room of strangers from different traditions could dance together immediately. That is a genuinely clever piece of social engineering.

The twentieth-century history is more complicated than the wholesome image suggests. Henry Ford spent heavily through the 1920s and 1930s promoting old-time dancing, funding instructors, publishing a manual and pushing the dance into school curricula. His enthusiasm was explicitly a reaction against jazz and the culture he associated with it, and it cannot be separated from his documented antisemitism and racial views. The revival worked, and a large part of square dancing's presence in American schools traces back to that campaign.

Modern Western square dancing later standardized the calls into a published program, so a dancer trained in one place can join a square anywhere. Traditional and regional forms carried on alongside it. Most US states have named square dancing an official state dance, and repeated attempts to make it the national folk dance have failed, partly over objections that the claim ignored the country's many other dance traditions.

How to take part

• Find a club night. Almost all of them run beginner sessions and expect newcomers.
• Go without a partner if you need to. Most groups rotate anyway.
• Listen to the caller instead of watching your feet.
• Try a traditional or regional dance as well as the modern standardized kind.
• Wear shoes that slide a little. Rubber soles grip the floor and will punish your knees.