Here’s an attempt to have a dance program consisting of three independent single dances that show new dancers a total of 22 square dance moves: Square Dance ABC. After attending the three dances in any order, the dancers would be ready to dance the “ABC” program.

What’s good about the program is that new dancers can come in any time…there’s no prerequisites. That’s a real benefit these days. The problem that I see is keeping enough new dancers flowing through to keep the dances going…unless the expectation is that the full ABC dancers would also attend the individual A, B, and C dances.

Contra works as a “no lessons required” dance form because there’s a large group of experienced dancers who come to every dance. Newcomers are integrated into the dance, but the dance form remains entertaining for the experienced dancers

I’m interested in following the ABC experiment

, and I”m glad that people are experimenting with different ways of teaching square dancing.