Modern Western square dance (also called Western square dance, contemporary Western square dance, modern American square dance or modern square dance) is one of two American types of square dancing, along with traditional square dance. As a dance form, modern Western square dance grew out of traditional Western dance. The term "Western square dance", for some, is synonymous with "cowboy dance" or traditional Western square dance. Therefore this article uses the term "modern Western square dance" to describe the contemporary non-historical dance which grew out of the traditional dance.
Modern Western square dance, like traditional square dance, is directed by a square dance caller. In modern Western square dance the caller strings together a sequence of individual square dance calls to make a figure or sequence. These calls are the building blocks of the choreography that is danced by the individuals, square dancers, in the squares. There are eight people (four couples) in each square; at a dance there may be many squares. Generally speaking, each of these squares dances independently of each other, with the exception of specialty or "gimmick" dances, where there might be some crossover of dancers from one square to another.
The square functions as a "dance team" for the duration of a square dance tip, a group of dances usually separated from the next tip by a pause during which the dancers regroup into new squares. A square dance tip is usually composed of a combination of patter calls and singing calls, the two types of square dance calls.
Read more about Modern Western Square Dance: Learning Modern Western Square Dance, Dancing Modern Western Square Dance, Dress Code, Flourishes, Sound Effects, and Games
Famous quotes containing the words square dance, modern, western, square and/or dance:
“The square dance fiddler’s first concern is to carry a tune, but he must carry it loud enough to be heard over the noise of stamping feet, the cries of the “caller,” and the shouts of the dancers. When he fiddles, he “fiddles all over”; feet, hands, knees, head, and eyes are all busy.”
—State of Oklahoma, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunities for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“It is fatally easy for Western folk, who have discarded chastity as a value for themselves, to suppose that it can have no value for anyone else. At the same time as Californians try to re-invent “celibacy,” by which they seem to mean perverse restraint, the rest of us call societies which place a high value on chastity “backward.””
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“If the physicians had not their cassocks and their mules, if the doctors had not their square caps and their robes four times too wide, they would never had duped the world, which cannot resist so original an appearance.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“The author’s conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)