I spent this afternoon at the New Mexico State Fair, for this event: 01:30 pm NM Square & Round Dance Assn. – Ford Pavilion (1:30 PM – 2:30 PM), which you can see listed here. It felt pretty schizoid; I think the other caller (an older gentleman) and I were on different wavelengths. He treated it like a dance, albeit without breaks. I treated as entertainment for the crowd (well, the few folks resting their feet in one of the few shadey spots). I tried to end it up on a rowsing singer; he took over and got the dancers into a big circle for a “good night right and left grand” with yellow rocks, and then a big thank you to themselves. Well, maybe that would make the onlookers think we are a fun group to join….maybe.

Then I went and had some “fair food” and watched a young dance troupe of “percussive” dancers, Powerhouse Dance Troupe (nothing on the web that I could find). Four young dancers, in t-shirts and jeans, doing an updated amalgam of traditional dancing: Irish step, clogging, and tap, to very modern popular music. As they said, it was step dancing without the lowered arms and clogging without the petticoats (yes, the leader did mention the absence of petticoats). To me, it seemed like tap dancing (since tap already seems like an amalgamation of other forms) to modern music. Very fun to watch, lots of kids watching. (We had lots of older folks watching the square dancers at the fair; like to like, I guess.)

Lloyd Shaw’s Cheyenne Mountain Dancers, a troupe of high school kids who toured the country in the 1940’s, is generally credited with being one of the sources for the resurgence of square dancing in post-WWII America. Maybe the CALLERLAB Foundation should sponsor a group of kids with some dynamite flying squares routines and send them off to tour the US.