Browse Items: 8

This detailed booklet describes waltz quadrilles, a style of dance enjoyed by dancers in this Oklahoma City group. The author are careful to draw a distinction with traditional dances, and predict that this form (combining square and round dancing) will become popular:

---
How many of us recall the old-time waltz quadrilles, the one that…

Black Hawk Waltz is a classic round (or couple) dance. The tune was composed by Mary Walsh in 1877. Here is a link to an illustration of the sheet music cover; you may also view instructions on the Lloyd Shaw Foundation website.The Black Hawk Waltz was one of the dances included by Lloyd Shaw in his Round Dance Book published in 1947. Round dances…

Round dancing refers to choreographed couple dances, prompted by a cuer and found as part of most regular programs of modern square dancing, interspersed with the patter calls and singing squares. This short history of round dancing was created by Jim Mayo; the link above takes you to the website of the Square Dance Foundation of New England, from…

Lloyd Shaw's Cheyenne Mountain Dancers took the country by storm on their many cross-country trips; their stylish dancing, and Shaw's ideas on the subject, influenced subsequent generations of dancers, especially in the new movement to what we now term modern square dancing. In his Shaw attempts to explain what he means by stylish dancing.

Round dancing, a form of couple dancing in which a cuer calls out the figures, is frequently a part of modern square dance clubs. In some locations, instead of round dances being incorporated into an evening of squares, they might be found at a separate club that only does round dances.

Traditional round dances, such as the Varsouvienne or the…

Olcutt Sanders was a Texas dance historian. He writes, "The round dances that are included quite generally on square dance programs these days originated in Europe in the late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries and gradually found their way across the Atlantic and to Texas. They were called round dances, of course, because they are danced by…

This is a handout by caller Ralph Piper for use at a class during the American Squares week at Camp Ihduhapi, MN, in 1953. He provides a brief description of different styles of waltz, then outlines in detail the steps he suggests using to teach the waltz.

This scholarly article looks in depth at a Grange dance in a small town in western Pennsylvania. Written from a sociological/folklorist perspective, the authors describe the community in which the dance takes place, the ethnic background of participants, the local economy, and the centrality of the event in community life:

"Considering the…