A cold and snowy Saturday night couldn’t keep the square-dance callers from their golden moment.
Across the floor of Webb Lecture Hall at Emporia State University, 120 dancers stepped and spun and promenaded to the words of one caller after another. This was the 50th anniversary for the Northeast Kansas Square Dance Callers Association and tonight, the spotlight would be on the microphone, not the dance floor.
“This is the first time I’ve called since November, so I don’t know what’s going to come out yet,” Larry Crady of Topeka said to a roomful of chuckles. Last November, Crady had a ruptured aneurysm and survived through a series of events that bordered on the miraculous. But Saturday night, there was no hesitation, just a musical string of words from the 35-year caller who effortlessly guided the dancers through the gospel standard “Light at the River.”
“Feels good, feels good,” he said after leaving the stage. “You get rusty pretty quickly, but that felt awful good.”
One way or another, the call goes on.
Square-dance calling is one of those things that’s a mixture of skill and art. You have to know the dances and the moves, but beyond that everyone has their own voice and style. Some write out their combinations ahead of time, reading them off a card. Some memorize the moves they want to use for a particular song. And some are “sight callers,” watching the dancers and improvising combinations like a jazz musician in a jam session, timing everything just right to bring everyone safely back to their starting place.
“I do mostly sight calling,” said Dale Stead of Emporia, who’s been doing this about 27 years. “I look out at the floor, pick out a couple, follow them and call pretty much anything I want to.”
When a dancer wants to become a caller, a week-long course helps nail down the basics. Most callers will take a refresher course every now and again. From there, it takes work and study and a darned good sense of rhythm to make it all hang together.
But once it clicks, it can be an awful lot of fun.
“I’d been in a country-western band,” Crady said, who did one year of square-dancing before becoming a caller. “I liked the music, took square-dance lessons and said ‘I can do that.’ And they’re much nicer people than you run into playing in bars.”
But while there are a number of good callers these days, dancers can be a bit harder to come by.
“That’s the problem we’re having with square dancing right now, is getting people to come and try it,” said Stead, the association’s vice president. “You do have to commit yourself to coming to lessons every week for between 12 and 20 weeks. But it’s not hard because we have that much time to teach it. It’s easy to learn.”
And the company’s worth it, Crady added.
“This is a good family activity,” he said as the next caller cued up a record and started the dancers off again. “You don’t worry about anyone drinking, doing drugs or anything like that. We’ve never had anything stolen.
“It’s like one family,” he said as the music and the do-si-does continued. “One big close family.”
hjcary (anonymous) says...
I remember "learning" (very short couple of classes) square dancing in PE class at EHS and I thought it was great. I wonder if they still touch on it out at EHS these days. It made for some fun in PE besides running and ball games.
February 5, 2007 at 2:30 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )