Tips For Your Tips
A series devoted to helping you become a more confident dancer.
| Value of Hands | As Neil Diamond sang: "Hands...touching hands...reaching out...touching me... touching you.". Square dancing is a social activity, and the touching of
hands constantly reminds us that our square is a team of eight people working together. |
| The Eyes Have It | Just as hand contact is valuable for comfortable dancing and successful squares,
so is eye contact. It also makes dancing more enjoyable. |
| Space - The Dancer's Frontier | Dancing involves people moving across the dance floor to music. How you use the space will affect
how smoothly and easily you dance. |
| Who Am I - Identifying Your Place in Your Square | Since each square dance call's definition assigns moves to designated dancers, it is necessary to
identify who you are at a given moment in order to execute your part(s). Sometimes,
standing still is your part. |
| Walls Are Our Friends | Most of our halls are rectangular. With the geometric nature of many of our formations, it makes good sense to use the walls to our advantage. |
| The Sound of Music | To borrow from a famous song, the dance floor is alive with the sound of music.
Music is what makes our activity dancing, not merely a caller moving human chess
pieces around the floor. |
| Intro to DBD - Dance by Definition, or Don't Be Deterred | For those who began square dancing without learning the definitions of the calls,
just hearing "DBD" is enough to make them shake their heads. Choreography that puts
you in different positions does not have to
be nerve-wracking. |
| Playing with Ocean Waves | Many calls in the Basic and Mainstream programs are defined with a starting
formation of facing dancers. However, to make choreography more interesting and
challenging, some callers will use a mini-wave or an ocean wave as the starting formation for those same calls. |
