Why do you know so much about square dancing?
Several years ago I took a creative writing class at The Attic on Hawthorne in SE Portland. During each session, we would read aloud what we had written over the week prior. After I read out my short story about a couple making sparks fly at a hoe down, the instructor asked, “How do you know so much about square dancing?”
I told my classmates how my brother-in-law has an abiding interest in folk music and customs and after taking a clogging class he joined a beginner’s square dancing class. He encouraged my wife and me to join too by describing how fun and interesting it was. We went and eventually completed the many months-long journey to memorizing 80-some Mainstream calls and earning our “Bachelor of Square Dancing” certificates.
Bachelor of Square Dancing diploma awarded by River City Dancers, 2007.
I noticed several things during the lessons and visits to other clubs for square dancing events:
Most everyone was white.
Most folks were at least age 50 or older.
The music was largely out of date and the playlists lacked funk, Hip Hop, or much contemporary flavor.
Most of the callers and experienced dancers or “angels” were religious and church-going.
Fashion statements were limited to the stereotypical square dance dresses and cowboy western-style apparel.
I really enjoyed the quick-thinking challenge of remembering how to perform a dance figure in the brief time between the caller saying it and when it was time to do it.
The patter between calls sounded like an auctioneer’s chant or rapping.
The experienced dancers added extra twirls, high fives, “skirt work,” and other personal flare as they danced.
The caller and the experienced dancers could interact during the songs mostly exchanging knowing looks and chuckles, high-fiving dancers in other squares, or sometimes playing tricks like trading squares with each other one or more times.
Although most of the people involved were very friendly and eager to help new dancers like us, we didn’t continue to dance because we didn’t feel like we fit in. We were younger, preferred different music, and felt more comfortable in groups with more cultural diversity.
However, I kept listening to square dance calls on my own and started collecting information about the choreography. I knew this art form would be more personally appealing if it looked and sounded like Hip Hop. So many of the appealing call-and-response elements were there but underutilized. Except for what I learned was called “sight calling,” improvisation seemed limited to dancer flare and missteps. But, the modular nature of the choreography was familiar to me from software architecture and the agile software development practices I’ve spent my career applying.
On the job, I recognized how the composition of software, and business systems in general, worked like square dance choreography: the head-to-tail alignment of functions and systems depended on the matching of outputs with inputs. As long as that mapping could occur, any given system could talk to any other system which is the basis of creative engineering and, more generally, design or hacking.
I realized that square dance calling is like hacking the geometric space of the dance floor using a potentially limitless library of dance figures. That idea connects with and is an expression of mathematics and computation and their abstract graphic representations.
But square dancing is thicker and juicier than this intellectual side alone. It synthesizes so much culture (music, song, dance, garments, customs, jargon, crafts, and more) that it is a special kind of human phenomenon. It has grown from the hybridization of traditions from Europe, Africa, and North America. It is a dynamic art form resonating at many aesthetic levels offering experiences ranging from the frivolous to the numinous.
I know so much about square dancing because it has captured my imagination as a suite of deeply creative techniques for bringing people together to celebrate the beautiful raucous elegance of being alive. I am spreading this love through our ethnocomputational approach to multimedia design, that is, using the African, European, and Indigenous algorithms present in the American square dance to inform graphic, motion, and sound designs.
