Over on the square dancing mailing list, they’re talking about renaming square dancing again. I got a little riled up by a post by the CALLERLAB Foundation’s marketing expert, James Hensley. Here’s what I wrote:

on 11/14/00 5:35 PM, James Hensley at cmarkets@earthlink.net wrote:

> A key problem we have here
> at the Foundation is trying to ‘gather’ all the components of our “Folk
> Dance Group” under one, usable, acceptable and marketable name for purposes
> of presentation. When we go to corporate sponsors (or for ads, public
> relations purposes) we need to not have to say, “Square, Round, Contra,
> Line, Clogging, English Traditional, etc, etc,” as part of our descriptive
> name.

Our hubris in this area is amazing. Modern western square dancing is not
part of most folk dance organizations and festivals. I’ve looked at lots of
websites describing folk dance festivals; these festivals include
international folk dance, contra dancing, traditional squares, English
country dancing and even swing dancing…but not MWSD. I don’t think we’re
legitimate spokespeople for all the myriad of dance forms that make up folk
dancing; in fact, many folk-oriented people do not consider MWSD to be a
folk activity because of its heirarchical, legislated nature.

> there is a caller in Texas that calls
> it “Geomotion” (since all the figures, squares, diamonds, circles, boxes,
> etc are geometric in shape)

Geomotion is used by Paul Galburt (http://bsd.ideaquest.com/geomotion/) as
a name for a computer program featuring a form of two couple square dancing
designed to introduce non-square dancers to the game of square dancing. I
think it’s a neat name…but it’s probably trademarked.

Nobody’s written back, but that happens to me a lot. Besides Geomotion, other suggested names are Team Dance, Sport Dance, Pattern Dance, American Folk Dance (and what about square dancers in other countries), National Folk Dance (sure, and what about the national folk dances of other countries), and Modern Western Dancing. The idea behind all this is to get rid of the dread “square” with all its negative connotations, at least for those of us of a certain generation.

So I stuck a few things into Google to see what would come up. TeamDance is interesting…a few photos of dance competitions (a country dance, Native American dance), a couple of foreign language pages (Japanese, German), and, most intriguingly, a German page on a Yorkie site involving dog dancing.

SportDance: there are “SportDance” competitions which involve aerobic, step, and hip-hop dancing (Triple-A), and a there’s a ‘SportDance’ club in Uppsala, but mostly “sportdance” is used in naming .html pages dealing with DanceSport. DanceSport, of course, is the new name for ballroom dancing, and will, I think, be an Olympic “sport” in Athens (sorry for the quotes…I guess if Ice Dancing can be considered a sport, why not Ballroom Dancing?). At any rate, there is an International DanceSport Federation, with a spiffy website and a nice professionally-designed logo.

Here’s a quote from a press release about DanceSport inclusion in the closing ceremonies of the Sidney Olympics:

DanceSport rivals the ice-skating sports for telegenic appeal. In addition, it has the powerful advantage that it is one of the few sports that has 100% gender parity and offers women exactly the same sport opportunities as men, right down to competing with men in the same events and on the same playing surface.

Hmmm…gender equity and television appeal…so that’s how they decide what activities get included in the Olympics…

Anyway, back to SportDance…I found out more that I really wanted to about Svetlana, a 35-year-old Russian woman whose favorite sport is sportdance (aerobika), and who wants to marry a westerner so much that she’s put herself on bunches of websites like RussianWife.net and LovePlace.com. I’ll bet she’d learn to square dance if the right guy approached her…