By Russ King

Long before I was a dancer, I loved to watch dance performances. Ballet, modern dance, folk dance, even those Renaissance
things they do out front at some of the Shakespeare festivals before the play begins--I loved it all. The first night I ever square
danced, back in 1981 with Skip Barrett's Foggy City Squares at the Trocadero Transfer, I remember thinking: "What fun--this is
like a Busby Berkeley routine for eight people!" I've always found the fusion of the kinetic impulse with the musical impulse to be
one of the finer things life has to offer.

I was posed the question "Can you square dance to Mozart?" I haven't tried it, but having devised performance pieces to Scott
Joplin, Glenn Miller, and Tchaikovsky, I suppose the answer would be a qualified "yes." (The Tchaikovsky piece was
choreographed to the waltz from Eugene Onegin; it never got past the workshop stage, but the dancers liked it.) Actually, if at
least eight dancers and a caller can agree on a uniform way of responding to the music, you can probably dance to anything
from Mozart to Nine Inch Nails, but since square dancers are not accustomed to cuing off the music, that's a pretty big IF. I had
my hands full with Joplin and Miller, even with lots of rehearsal time, and "Why bother in the first place," you may ask. Well. . .
In the early 1980's ('82 and '83, to be precise), gay square dancing was in the process of developing a national consciousness.
The half dozen or so known gay clubs (most of which would later form the initial core of the IAGSDC) had begun to connect
socially via fly-ins and related events. At these get-togethers, each club would usually do some sort of demonstration dance,
somewhat in the spirit of presenting a calling card or letter of introduction. This trend peaked at the 1983 Reno Gay Rodeo's
Country Dance Festival. Midnight Squares premiered two hash pieces by Rob Daoud showcasing their then-unique proficiency
at the Advanced program, one of which creatively adapted several calls to a six-couple format. Capital City Squares did a
singing call highlighted by the creative use of props for humorous effect, and Foggy City Squares did their patented high-energy,
high-precision singing calls to Skip's dynamic vocals. At Western Star, we had no performance team, precision, nor otherwise;
and our collective knowledge of Plus was limited, let alone Advanced; so with Scott Carey's invaluable support and
encouragement, I got the green light to try something that would take a completely different approach.

I decided to try matching square dance moves to a nontraditional but catchy piece of good music and settled on Scott Joplin's
The Rag Time Dance. After listening to the piece over and over, I found musically appropriate places for an All-Four Ladies
Teacup Chain, Grand Spin, and Relay the Deucey. The final version began with two separate squares and mutated into a single
Siamese square for the grand finale. It was well received in Reno (where the performance included the public debut of the
Western Star vests, newly designed by Dennis Ficken) and, a few weeks later, at a dance in San Francisco. (It was revived five
years later, in slightly revised form, for Western Star's 6th Anniversary Dance.) But I learned during this experience that
coordinating a live caller with the music was very tricky indeed. (If Placido Domingo ever becomes available to us,
I might be persuaded to take another look at the Tchaikovsky piece.) And, no matter how appropriate to the music the
sequences of calls may be in other respects, getting the dancers to all do the same thing with their feet when the music isn't in
4/4 time (The Rag Time Dance happens to be in 2/4.) is an adventure in itself. So, my rather labor-intensive methods have to
date produced just two more pieces--the Glenn Miller In the Mood for Club La Star '85 (using square dancers also adept at
swing, with Andrews Sisters-style vocals arranged by Ric Wilson), and a relatively traditional singing call to San Francisco for the
Golden Gate Bridge 50th Anniversary walk in May of 1987. Later that year, I discovered Scottish Country Dancing and found in it
a social dance form much more compatible with my particular interest in tying movement to music of quality.

As with square dancing, Scottish country dancing is usually done in four-couple groups (sometimes in squared sets, but more
often in facing lines). The vocabulary of figures is smaller, but the footwork is more complicated, with specific modifications for
different types of music. Each dance is structured like a singing call, with a repeating pattern of figures (usually 32 bars in length,
often written to go with a particular tune) that keeps on going until everyone is back where they started. The sequence of figures
must be memorized and is only cued when the dance is being taught; thereafter, the instructor merely gives a verbal recap
before the music begins. Timing the movements to the music (or "phrasing") is considered as important as knowing their
geography, because, without a caller, it is the uniformity of the dancers' responses to the music which holds everything together.

Live music played by experienced musicians is standard at weekend dances, and at some club nights, too. A weekend dance
program usually contains about 15 dances, some hundreds of years old, some written recently, which have been taught in detail
during the week at club nights. One interesting discovery I made when I took up Scottish: Although Skip Barrett's memorized-
singing-calls-only approach to square dancing at the Trocadero did not mix well with Callerlab, it had its roots in social dance
traditions dating as far back as the 18th Century.

So, I discovered a dance form with no live caller to worry about, clearly established footwork, and high-quality music taken for
granted. I was in a social dance choreographer's hog heaven. So far, I've written about twenty dances, about half of which have
had good exposure in the Bay Area (and occasionally beyond) and three of which have been published in a local collection. Now
if we could only get a gay group going. . . .