Where does square dancing belong in the various categorized directories? Most put it under Dance, which is under Performing Arts. But I consider square dancing (and other participatory dance forms like folk dancing and contra dancing) to be a Recreation or maybe a Hobby. While some groups do exhibitions, performing is not a major part of the activity. Yet if it goes there, people may not find it because they’re looking for under Dance.

As a subcategory editor for the Open Directory, I’m going to propose a link under one of the Recreation subcategories…if people are browsing for a recreation, I’d like them to consider square dancing…or folk dancing, or contra dancing, or swing dancing…

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Speaking of swing, want to learn to dance? bustamove! learn to dance. This is cool…get a basic lesson for free; if you can’t get the move from that, pay a buck for the more detailed lesson on the same move. What’s also cool is that this site got a reference in the Earthlink email weekly…how many millions of people are all hopping their way over to bustamove?

Learn to square dance on the web? GeoMotion, a CD-ROM based learning system is the closest I’ve seen; as bandwidth gets wider, I would think the GeoMotion system could be web-based.

Of course, the problem with learning to square dance is that one needs more than one person. Even the bustamove site deals with the issue by telling people that they can learn the moves by themselves (this is, perhaps, overly optimistic, but at least one only needs two people to learn couple dance moves). GeoMotion requires four people; regular square dancing requires eight.

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Square Dance World no longer has a callers database…well, actually, it does, but it’s no longer listed on the main page, and the only way to get to it is to do a search. I searched on “jensen” and then from my name, I could get to the “I/J” callers. I think it’s a smart decision; send interested folks over to Vic Ceder’s caller database.