[Squaredancing] 15-Jul-2007 New York Times urban square dance article

Sun Jul 15 17:02:08 EDT 2007

The article below appeared in the July 15,2007 - New York Times - is a 
reasonably accurate portrayal of our Dance activities.

I would encourage everyone to share this article - with appropriate credit 
to the New York Time - to all dancers.  This could be a useful tool to add 
credibility to enticing other media to cover our activities.

Jim Maczko - Past Chairman of the Governing Board (2004-2006)
ALLIANCE OF ROUND, TRADITIONAL AND SQUARE-DANCE, INC.
Post Office Box 712918
San Diego, California  92171-2918

619-295-2635

jmaczko at san.rr.com

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City Folk Who Feel the Call of the Do-Si-Do
By JOY GOODWIN
Published: July 15, 2007

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Michael Nagle for The New York Times
The Times Squares are comfortable when men partner with men.

IN a church basement decorated with balloons and twinkling lights, 100 
dancers organized in four long rows faced their partners. On the stage at 
one end, a band began a fiddle-and-banjo tune. As a man rattled off the 
names of steps into his mike, the lines on the floor rearranged themselves 
in shifting patterns, a controlled whirl of revolving bodies and twirling 
skirts.

Less than a mile away in a middle school gym, 20 couples arrayed in five 
moving squares let out whoops and hollers as they stamped through promenades 
and do-si-dos to a recording of "Sweet Georgia Brown."

It was another Saturday night in the West Village, where every weekend 
scores of New Yorkers take part in a folk tradition long associated with 
barns and bolo ties: square dancing. Though the pastime's popularity has 
declined since 1976, when the National Square Dance Convention in Anaheim, 
Calif., drew a record crowd of 40,000, today New York - like Boston, 
Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Seattle and dozens of other American cities - 
supports a modest but resilient square-dancing and contradancing scene.

Both forms trace their roots to 17th-century English country dancing, and 
both use callers - skilled announcers who call out real-time instructions to 
the dancers. But while square dancing evolved from the French quadrille, 
whose basic unit is four couples in a square, contradancing is organized in 
long opposing lines of paired couples.

Country Dance New York is the latest in a series of organizations that have 
been holding beginner-friendly contradances since 1951 at the Church of the 
Village, at West 13th Street and Seventh Avenue South. The practice of 
Modern Western square dancing - which requires newcomers to take a formal 
sequence of classes before attending events - is represented by two local 
clubs. The itinerant Times Squares, established in 1985, meet at a number of 
Manhattan locations, including P. S. 3; and the 29-year-old Al'e'mo Squares 
hold dances every other Sunday at a church in Gravesend, Brooklyn.

Today's urban square dancers may check their clubs' schedules on the 
Internet and arrive by subway, but there are echoes of square dancing's 
small-town past at events sponsored by these New York clubs. All three - 
Country Dance New York, the Times Squares and the Al'e'mo Squares - are 
mom-and-pop endeavors, organized by volunteers who do everything from 
booking the callers to handling the cash box at the door. (Tickets run from 
$5 to $10.) Borrowed school gymnasiums and church basements serve as dance 
halls, as they do in the rest of the country. All three clubs have potluck 
snack tables, and two of the three have 50-50 raffles. And at the Al'e'mo 
Squares, dancers often wear the western-style shirts and pioneer skirts 
still favored by the country's stricter Modern Western clubs.

But there are also departures from tradition. At a Times Squares event 
earlier this year, men in jeans and shorts swung their partners - in most 
cases, other men. The group is one of more than 60 gay and lesbian clubs 
that have sprung up throughout the United States since the International 
Association of Gay Square Dance Clubs was founded in 1983. Though most of 
the nation's square-dance clubs still cater to male-female couples, gay 
clubs are responsible for a sizable percentage of Modern Western's growth 
over the last two decades - especially in cities, where most gay clubs are 
located.

At the P. S. 3 gymnasium, the Times Squares' predominantly male dancers 
skillfully executed the caller's instructions, unfazed by directives like 
"promenade the lady on your right" and "bow to the gentleman on your left." 
Dayle Hodge, 45, the event's caller, said that in 25 years he had observed a 
few differences between gay and traditional clubs. "At gay clubs the energy 
level is typically higher, and the dancers add more flourishes to the 
 steps," Mr. Hodge said. Gay dancers, in his experience, tend to be 
extremely comfortable with the calls, and many are accustomed to switching 
between the man's part and the woman's part as needed. "I can call more 
quickly and more intricately at gay clubs," he said. "But gay or straight, 
the calls are the same."

Identical calls are used at the Times Squares and the Al'e'mo Squares - and 
for that matter, in Tennessee and Wisconsin - because today's Modern Western 
clubs support a nationally standardized curriculum developed by the 
Callerlab organization. Founded in 1971 by a group of callers, Callerlab 
codifies the steps used in square dancing. Its guidelines require dancers to 
take several months' worth of classes and master a defined vocabulary of 
steps before attending their first event. Thus there is little on-the-spot 
teaching at a Modern Western dance - and there are no beginners.

There are, however, several cumulative levels of mastery in Modern Western 
square dancing. Dancers can stop at Basic (a program of 53 calls) or 
continue through seven more programs to the highest level, with more than 
200 calls.

"Modern Western square dancing is like crossword puzzles," said Nick 
Martellacci, 55, a Times Squares member who also calls and teaches classes. 
"Some people like doing the Reader's Digest puzzle. And there are other 
people who aren't happy until they're doing the Sunday Times puzzle in ink, 
without a dictionary."

>From a raised platform, Mr. Hodge surveyed the floor as he raced through a 
series of calls. He was doing what he calls sight calling, in which the 
caller, who has nothing written down, choreographs each dance on the fly, 
making sure to reconcile all the patterns to bring the dancers "back home" 
to the place where they started by the end of the song.

"Square dancing is a language," Mr. Hodge explained. "The definitions are 
given by Callerlab. There are some rules to the language, just as you can't 
use eight nouns and no verb in a sentence. But by and large, how I put the 
calls together is up to me."

On the floor, the dancers concentrated intently on reacting to a sequence of 
calls they had never before heard. The Times Squares are not, however, an 
all-work-and-no-play kind of club. As the dancers trekked through the calls, 
they improvised flourishes, like bumping hips and slapping hands.

Some wore name badges stamped with the club's name; a smattering of gold 
badges designated the club's 10-year members. The participants, most of them 
longtime New Yorkers, included nurses, actors, accountants, teachers, a 
doctor, a costume designer, a market researcher and a visiting couple from a 
club in Oregon. The youngest was 39.

At the Al'e'mo Squares in Brooklyn one spring night, the median age was 
considerably higher. Most of the members were retirees, and a member couple's 
50th-anniversary party had reduced attendance a bit. Still, the dancers on 
hand were an enthusiastic bunch. Most sported western wear in red and white, 
the club's signature colors, and several wore club badges festooned with 
ribbons and small charms called dangles.

"They're like Boy Scout merit badges," said Walter Lasky, the club's 
historian. He pointed to a dog-shaped charm marked "Rover," awarded for 
traveling 1,000 miles to dance at another club. And he showed off the club's 
"raid banner," where visiting members of other clubs had been affixing their 
pins for almost three decades.

A look at the banner revealed why the tradition of "raiding" another club is 
on the wane in these parts. Most of the clubs represented - the Ocean Waves 
and Richmond Dancers of Staten Island, the Kings Squares of Brooklyn, the 
Queens Squares, the Big Apple Squares - are now defunct.

The pins and badges hark back to the 1950s and '60s, when American square 
dancing was in its heyday. Like bowling leagues and bridge clubs, 
square-dance groups experienced rapid growth in the postwar years before 
tapering off in the 1980s. Just as Callerlab fixed a list of standard calls 
in 1971, the style and accouterments of Modern Western square dancing seem 
to have fossilized in the '60s and early '70s. The traditional square-dance 
attire worn by the Al'e'mo Squares and other clubs has less to do with the 
Old West than with the fashions featured on television shows like "Lawrence 
Welk" or "Hee Haw."

Watching the dancers respond to calls like "star through" and "wheel and 
deal," Mr. Lasky of the Al'e'mo Squares nodded approvingly at a visiting 
woman who wore what he called "a real square-dancing outfit" - a dress with 
a flaring petticoat skirt. In keeping with longstanding tradition, "we 
almost insist that the men wear long sleeves," he said. "But summertime is 
slowly becoming more casual. The sleeves get shorter. Some men even wear 
short pants."

At Country Dance New York one Saturday night, by comparison, there were no 
costumes, badges or banners, and no squares - just long lines of paired 
dancers. Moreover, a handful of novices - emboldened by a 45-minute beginner 
workshop before the dance - were being shepherded along by the seasoned 
dancers. Here the caller's role was not to challenge the dancers, but to 
bolster them. The democratic spirit of early American square dancing, which 
embraced the concept of callers to make it easier for all comers to 
participate, was alive and well.

As a live band played an up-tempo fiddle version of "Bei Mir Bist du 
 Schoen," each couple danced for 30 seconds with a pair of "neighbors," then 
progressed down the line to a new set of neighbors and danced the same 
pattern again.

Compared with their Modern Western counterparts, the contradancers looked 
young, relaxed and recreational. People in their 20s wearing tie-dyed 
T-shirts danced with middle-aged veterans in print skirts and Teva sandals.

Many recalled being introduced to contradancing in college; after moving to 
New York, they said, they had looked up the local club on the Internet. The 
event's caller was a chemist by day. The entire scene recalled the title of 
a 1995 scholarly article about the demographics of contradancing, "Yuppies 
Invaded My Tradition at Midnight."

Standing over the potluck table during a break, the perspiring members 
described "dawn dances" in New England, where they had promenaded through 
the night, and the club's own English country dances, which required further 
instruction and had a "more elegant, Jane Austen feeling." More than one 
married couple said they had met at a contradance. Members said they prided 
themselves on welcoming newcomers and frequently changing partners.

"We're this little displaced group," said Olivia Janovitz, an Upper West 
Sider who started dancing with the club in the early 1980s. "We should 
probably be in some little town in New England. But instead this is our 
small-town community, in the middle of the city."

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "ljknews" <ljknews at mac.com>
To: "This list for discussing all aspect of MWSD" <squaredancing at rbnsn.com>
Sent: Sunday, July 15, 2007 11:41 AM
Subject: [Squaredancing] 15-Jul-2007 New York Times urban square dance 
article

> On another list, Daniel Jason of Times Squares gave us advance information
> about an article to appear in the Arts & Leisure section in the July 15
> (Sunday) issue of the New York Times.  On page 21, below the fold, is
> "City Folk Who Feel the Call of the Do-Si-Do", discussing Times Squares,
> Al'e'mo Squares and a Contra group called Country Dance New York.
>
> I thought it was the most accurate and thorough MWSD articles I have seen
> in the popular press.  But they did use the phrase "more than 200 calls"
> for a number I count as 1171 (462 if you leave out C4).  Perhaps that
> inaccuracy in a public piece is in our favor :-)
> -- 
> Larry Kilgallen
>
> _______________________________________________
> Squaredancing mailing list
> Squaredancing at rbnsn.com
> http://rbnsn.com/mailman/listinfo/squaredancing_rbnsn.com
> 
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