Dancing with a difference ...

  
  What we do:
Many people will have been to a hoedown or barn dance and will have danced at least one square dance. These dances have the formation of eight dancers, two on each side of a square. The caller explains the moves in the dance – at the start there will be relatively few so that they are quickly and easily learnt. Moves such as swing your partner, star and dosado may be familiar already.
 		  
  The square dance caller is a vital part of square dancing. The caller provides the music and directs the dancing. At a dance, the caller calls a number of tips. A tip is a programme of various square dance moves. In a tip, the caller directs the dancers through calls to a background of music and then does a singing call, usually to a popular song in which the caller sings the lyrics, interspersed with square dance calls. During a tip, the ladies progress from one partner to the next until they get back to their starting position.
 		  
 

Contemporary square dancing is divided into five programmes: basic, mainstream, plus, advanced and challenge. Each programme consists a set of defined moves or calls.

For square dancers to dance at outside events they should be able to do the moves up to mainstream.

  
         
  Where it's from:
 Many folk dances were taken by immigrants to America from Europe. American square dancing has developed over the years from these roots as the various dance styles of the immigrant communities merged together with the integration of the different nationalities.

Square dancing was brought back to Europe in the 1940s by American troops and there was much interest for it in the UK, especially when the Queen, then Princess Elizabeth, square danced during a visit to Canada in the 1950s.