 If you enjoy watching Common Ground online, please consider making a tax-deductible donation at lptv.org. Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people November 4th, 2008. I'm Tammy Rogers with First City Squares. I'm currently the vice president of First City Squares, and we have a group that meets twice a month during September through May. And I have children and a husband that come in Square Dance with me, and I consider these my great friends. Our dancers come from not only the immediate area, but some of them come from Grand Rapids, from Park Rapids, from Fort Francis. We have about two dances a month during the season, and then we do some other things during the summer, like the 4th of July parade. I'm Royce Nelson. Besides being a square dancer, I am the club caller for the First City Squares here in Bemidji. Square dancing is just moving to the beat of the music. It's entirely different than a waltz or a two-step. You're not out there counting one, two, three, one, two, three, so you don't even need to know how to count to do this. It's an interaction. You as a dancer are interacting with seven other dancers on the floor doing what the caller commands you to do. The better you are at what you do, the more enjoyable it is for the other seven dancers in the square. You generally know who your partner is, but to meet six other people, interact with them, dance with them, have a great time. It's a tremendous activity. Square dance music has to have a certain steady beat to it, and the caller typically takes out the words. He sings the words, he'll sing a few phrases, and then he'll give a call. He'll say dos, I do, or element left, and then he'll sing a few more of the words. So you have to stay in motion, even though he might be singing words or giving you a call. My job as a caller is to give the commands to the dancers. None of this is rehearsed. They do not know what I'm going to call. Probably for the better part of it, I don't know what I'm going to call. We start out, they know the commands, but it's up to me to put the commands together in a smooth flowing dance sequence, and then after I've moved them around, they think I've mixed them up. Hopefully I haven't. But at some point in time, then it's my job to solve the puzzle I've created, get everybody back with their original partner, and get them back into the position where they started. It doesn't really matter very much what type of music it is, if it's contemporary or soft rock or country, as long as the beat is steady. It's really up to the caller what type of music he chooses, and they can speed it up or slow it down, especially for lessons. If someone is just learning or if it's a younger group, he'll do it at a slower pace. But it really is the caller's choice what type of music he uses, and so there are different callers. We don't always have the same caller at our dances. I got into becoming a caller. I learned to dance in 1972 when I was just out of college. I would have liked to have become a square dance caller at that time, but one of my best friends was the instructor and caller then, and we didn't need another caller. And by the time I'd gotten through college, my high school music teacher had pretty much convinced me that I couldn't sing. So I just put it off. I took a 35-year break in there to have a career and raise a family. And in 2001, I got back into square dancing. The gentleman that started the club had resurrected the club here in Bemidji, had just gotten it going, decided to retire from his job and moved to Arizona, which left the Bemidji club without a caller. And I thought that was a prime time to give it a try. So I bought some used equipment on eBay, came with about a dozen old scratched up records, and that's where I started. In a square dance, everybody does have a partner. A square would always be a square of eight people or four couples. The people that come just on their own, they would pair up with one of our regular members. There's one couple that will have their back to the caller, then going around the square counterclockwise. There'll be a side couple, an opposite couple, and a left hand or a corner couple. As the dance gets underway, there will be different calls. The dancers will move, not necessarily in sequence, but they're coordinated. Some dancers might be going right, some dancers might be going left, but never should they run into each other. And it should be a smooth flowing activity. Square dancing hand movements are generally right, left, right, left. So if I do my job well at the end of the dance, you will have had a pleasant, enjoyable experience with no herky, jerky action. Members can make requests of the caller for a certain type of music that they want, but typically it is up to the caller what he decides to play and call to. The music over the years has evolved and people have a lot of preconceived misconceptions about what the music is. They think it's all country-western, twangy banjo, fiddle music. And in my list of music, I have got Bruno Mars, I've got Lady Gaga, I do an Adele. The movement is toward non-traditional music, and if the tempo is right, it has a required beat. You can dance, it's just about anything. First thing that someone would notice when you walk into a room with square dancers is probably the dresses and skirts of the girls. A lot of frills. And then you'll also notice the boys are wearing western style shirts and bolos, which are kind of like a tie, but western style. Then you'll notice how coordinated square dancing is, probably. It's very coordinated unless the square dancers aren't doing very well. And then, well, you can imagine. I have probably danced hundreds of tips that I have gotten through without making a mistake, and I can't remember a single one of them. But the ones that I have the most fun with are the ones that we messed up so bad that we got laughing and just couldn't continue to dance. So it's great fun, and I've told everybody when I'm teaching lessons, if you're not having fun, you're not square dancing, you're doing something else, and I don't know what it is. But square dancing is meant to be fun, and that's the name of the whole game. To become a square dancer, it takes several years to get really proficient at it. To learn the basic movements, you can learn them in a couple of weekends if you're really going at it. But to become really proficient, it takes quite a few years. At a square dance event, you don't necessarily go to that event and dance for two hours straight. Typically, you're going to dance for about 15 or 20 minutes and then take a break, and then somebody else might come in, and that's called a tip. When you're square dancing, the music that you'll listen to mostly is a western style music. Lately, they've come up with more modern music as well. For a long time, the majority was western, and now it's because of the beat. Square dancing relies a lot on the beat of the music, and you need to be able to hear that, and western style music had that. So, that's what stayed with mostly until recently. It would be nice if people understood the value of square dancing. We don't want it to die as an art. It's good for families. It's good for young people. It's something young people can do with older people. It's not difficult to learn. It's a little more difficult when you get older, but the callers know how to teach and how to go through the same steps over and over until you're comfortable with them, and then they put them into a different sequence, and they go over that sequence over and over again. So, even those of us who don't dance well, we don't know how to waltz. We weren't taught square dancing when we were young. You can still learn how to square dance. We get requests every now and then for special events, whether it be the fair, dancing at the Midget State Park. We just put out the call for dancers and get a group together and go do our thing. When I'm square dancing, it's really nice because it's just something, it's almost second nature when you really get into it. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland Public Television's Common Ground, consider making a contribution at lptv.org.