Square Dance History Project
The rich story of North American square dance finally has a home in the digital age.

Browse Items (36 total)

  • Tags: instruction
Moving Image

Let's Square Dance - instructional films, 1950s

In the mid-1950s, Janet R. MacLean, a professor in the Indiana University Department of Recreation, produced a series of six instructional films to introduce square dancing. The films, each… View item
Document

Square Dance Lessons - Doc Alumbaugh

A series of photographs with text illustrating basic square dance figures. This set, incomplete at the moment, appeared in a Rochester, New York, newspaper in 1950; Alumbaugh led a series of… View item
Document

Don't Forget, Callers, Our Style Is Always Showing

This is a copy of a section of the minutes of a meeting of the Southern California Callers Association. Bob Van Antwerp presented the training session on the subject of dancing style and how callers… View item
Document

Doc Alumbaugh - styling

Alumbaugh's "Styling Suggestion for Square Dancing" is a systematic approach to what he sees as the five components: • Poise • Bearing • Rhythm • Timing • Local Mannerisms The… View item
Sound

Duck for Oysters (clip) - Burns & Wheeler

"Duck for the Oyster, Dig for the Clams" is surely one of the most common traditional square dance figures. There are many examples of this dance on the SDHP website. Here it's "Duck for Oysters,… View item
Sound

Susanna (instruction) - Ed Durlacher

This is the very first dance on the first disk of Ed Durlacher's Honor Your Partner series, an extensive collection of dance and rhythmic music albums that were widely-used in schools. Here,… View item
Document

Honor Your Partner - records

Honor Your Partner was a series of rhythmic activities and dance albums, more than 20 in all, released by Ed Durlacher starting in 1949 as 78 rpm records, continuing into the 1950s and beyond as vinyl… View item
Sound

Around the Outside - Ed Durlacher

Honor Your Partner was a series of rhythmic activities and dance albums, more than 20 in all, released by Ed Durlacher starting in 1949 and extending into the 1950s. This dance is from Album 1, the… View item
Sound

Push Her Away - Ed Durlacher

Honor Your Partner was a series of rhythmic activities and dance albums, more than 20 in all, released by Ed Durlacher starting in 1949 and extending into the 1950s. This dance is the final one in… View item
Sound

The Basket - Ed Durlacher

Honor Your Partner was a series of rhythmic activities and dance albums, more than 20 in all, released by Ed Durlacher starting in 1949 and extending into the 1950s. This is the final dance on album… View item
Sound

Smoke On The Water, introduced by Ed Gilmore

During a morning workshop at the 1954 Minnesota State Convention Ed Gilmore introduces a "new" singing call written by his friend Pancho Baird.Tony Parkes comments:===It may have been new, but Ed had… View item
Moving Image

Square Dance Patterns - Joan Bennett

This 1969 film was created by Joan Lockhart Bennett as part of her master's degree project for Ilinois State University, Normal, IL.. As an instructional tool this film covers a lot of ground:… View item