^calling a dance in a winery, 2022
Hi readers, old and new! It’s been a long few months of working on this piece. It feels really different than anything I’ve written before and I am excited to share it with y’all. Hoping that feeling sort of “done” with this can make room for paying attention to other writing projects (to be sent with greater frequency!) lots of love. -CL
Shoot for the hole in the old tin can! Stomping and laughter join the fiddle music pouring forth from the stage as the ring of dancers follow the call and, while still holding hands, duck underneath each other's arched arms. I wait for most, if not all, dancers to end up facing the right direction again and then call out, swing your partner! The dancers drop hands from the group and twirl in twos along to the bass and banjo and the fiddler starts the tune from the top.
This square dance is held in a bike shop with concrete floors and shelves of bicycle parts lining every wall. Someone has strung a few strands of twinkle lights on the ceiling and there’s a by-donation bar tucked into one corner. People have walked up from the street dressed in vaguely-Western wear— twirly skirts and cowboy button-downs— but there’s no dress code, except the acknowledgement that boots make stomping more fun. In the coastal California town where I live, there’s enough of us who care about community dances that events like this one have come back after the years of social isolation. Last year, I began to learn the art of instructing, or as it’s called in square dancing, calling, dances from the stage. After all that time with almost no human touch, let alone the breath of dozens of strangers in a small space together, I wanted to be part of bringing people together to experience joy. Standing on stage in a pair of knee-high cowboy boots and a thrifted jumpsuit, calling out dance steps in front of a band playing the oldest music America knows how to make, I feel as though I am facilitating the antithetical experience to what we all just endured in the pandemic.
There is something magical about a square dance. It starts with a couple— two dancers of any gender, joined in a group, or square, of other couples. The dance is always accompanied by a live dance band playing traditional southern folk tunes, often called ‘old time music.’ The band is composed of a fiddle, guitar, banjo and hopefully a bass which creates the pumping heart that square dancers often move along to. It’s energetic. The dancers are fueled by the musicians who are fueled by the dancing, and together, they create a sense of wholeness. Furthermore, all the dances are taught at the start and steps are announced by a caller on stage throughout so even the most dance-wary attendee has little excuse not to find a partner to do-si-do. The unpretentiousness of a dance like this one invites everyone, no matter their age or skill level or political leanings, to participate. That night at the bike shop, silly and smiling from the sheer number of people who came out to dance together, it struck me how impossible any of this was to replicate online and how deeply I had missed it. It felt cathartic. This particular style of square dancing, done by young people in barrooms and bike shops, has for a long time been an important source of community and joy in my life. My journey of learning to call dances, first from a contra dance teacher named Clare, and later from friends in the local scene, inspired me to learn more about where this fun-first style of square dancing came from, why it matters, and where it’s going.
Square dancing originally grew out of French quadrille teachers touring throughout the southeastern United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. According to scholar of traditional Appalachian dance Phil Jamison, the dances they taught were adopted by locals and then changed, paired with the tunes brought over by Irish indentured servants and improvised dance calls, or patter, traditionalized by Black musicians. What emerged from those early dances was carried throughout the southeast by riverboat musicians, and a uniquely American style of dancing was born. Square dance continued to evolve over the following centuries, but I don’t think I would have found out about this style of music and dance if it weren’t for a Portland-based caller who named Bill Martin.
In the late 1990s, Portland, Oregon was a hub of folk musicians, punks, and artists eager to try new things. Bill was already a well-known local bluegrass and folk musician, and he was intrigued by the old dances of Appalachia and the music that accompanied them. When he began to call local square dances in Portland’s community centers and art spaces alongside an old time band called Foghorn, he was surprised and delighted to see that it was the punks and artists who showed up to sashay and allemande. And when Bill taught square dancing, he was about as far from a French quadrille teacher as you might find. In 2003, Oregon Art Beat filmed a mini-documentary about Bill Martin and the square dance scene in Portland. “I always say,” he smiled into the camera, “that it’s a party first and a dance second.” For Bill, the joy and connection of dancing together always outweighed whether or not the dancers were doing the steps exactly right.
I think that’s what caught my attention one winter’s night at the Moon and Sixpence, a Portland bar down the street from my college rental house. I was a mostly morose art student in my early twenties and I didn’t expect to end up at a square dance that night. Growing up, I loved music but felt too tone deaf and clumsy to participate in it. Songs were purchased on iTunes for 99 cents. Dancing seemed like something that girls with more confidence than me inexplicably knew how to do. It was an awkward period of life for me— bored by college, but too young to really fit into the Portland culture scene, disconnected much of what was going on around me. There seemed little that could break this spell of disenchantment until I heard an Appalachian fiddle tune and a great party. When someone stood on a chair in that bar and instructed us to find a partner, I listened. I followed the simple steps they explained. When the music began, I jostled along, grinning from ear to ear. I recognized and responded to the co-creational nature of the dance: that the dancers belong and participate just as much as the caller and the band. Every single one of us made that dance happen, and I felt in my body the satisfaction and joy that comes from participating in music. Square dancing and the traditional music that accompanies it has been a way to join in on the making of music after growing up thinking of it as something I only passively consume. In the words of Charmaine Slaven, a musician and dancer from the Seattle Subversive Square Dance Society, when I found square dancing and old time music, “I instantly felt like I was part of something bigger.”
In the early days of the Portland dance scene, Bill didn’t just call great square dance parties; he taught his craft to eager learners, practicing with small groups in living rooms and backyards. One of those learners was an aspiring caller named Caroline Oakley. She’s featured in the Oregon Art Beat documentary as well, fresh faced and ponytailed, carrying a baby on her back as she calls out the steps to a traditional square. In the video, Caroline is about the age I am now, just learning to call dances. She was at the beginning of something then, learning from a teacher who passed on to her knowledge of calling traditional square dances.
Bill Martin passed away in 2012, but the callers he taught continue the tradition of joyful community dance where the party comes first. After learning about Bill, I felt a strong desire to learn what became of the callers he taught, and where their paths have led them as we emerge from several years of little to no community dancing. I was already planning to travel to Portland to visit some friends, so I sent an email to Caroline Oakley, asking if she’d be willing to chat with me.
Talking to Caroline twenty years after she appeared in the Oregon Art Beat special, she has the same committed expression when she speaks about community music and dance. Her energy is a collected and tranquil complement to my star-struckedness when she invites me to join her on warm turf at her son’s afternoon soccer game. In the two decades since she learned to call under Bill Martin’s tutelage, she has risen to a well-known name in the West Coast scene. Caroline called at the Sunday Square Dance in Portland for the better part of a decade and taught music to young children and their parents as part of an organization called Music Together. Art grant after art grant, she developed a curriculum to teach elementary school children about the history and power of community dancing, complete with live music in the classroom (she can call and play guitar at the same time). She’s traveled to folk festivals from Los Angeles to Alaska, and her knowledge of square dance is vast.
Today, though, on the sidelines of this soccer game, she feels the same size as me. We are both petite women dressed in layers for the day’s cloudy weather, and we’re almost exactly two decades apart in age. We both keep sewing projects in our bags— she noticed mine and examined it, admiring the French knots in my embroidery. We both love children and live music, Oregon rivers and bringing people together. Later, Caroline mentions her old bike route and I am struck by the ways our young adulthood trajectories have paralleled. Caroline is enmeshed in something that I am running toward— music, community, motherhood. And we have both just come out of three years where, in her words, “It felt like square dancing was dead.”
The Sunday Square Dance hasn’t returned since its initial closure in March of 2020. Being a dance caller and community music organizer is already tough, says Caroline, in a world where people are resistant to paying musicians to perform. And the pandemic exacerbated that reluctance. “This is really a pivotal time,” she said, citing the combination of Covid and general societal breakdown and overuse of technology. “I feel like I’m swimming upstream trying to keep live music and community dance alive.”
When I asked her about the pathway back to square dancing, Caroline mentioned events aimed at kids and families. “Any kind of music that brings kids in is really important… Kids are so drawn intuitively to music in a way that grown-ups kind of forget or fall asleep to.” Caroline would know. Alongside all her musical accomplishments, she’s the mother of three boys. I asked her about it.
“There’s people that have kids and they stop doing all the things they love. They shift to being a parent. My kids are going to be part of what I love and I’m gonna drag them around… I just kept doing the things I loved doing.”
I don’t have kids, but I want them. Sitting on the sidelines of this soccer game with Caroline had me thinking again about lineages and how we learn from the people who came before us. Square dancing and the old time music that accompanies it are still around today because people have been doing it and teaching it to others in living rooms and dance halls for hundreds of years. It’s rare to have that kind of teaching and learning experience, outside the bounds of traditional education and completely dependent on intergenerational relationships and knowledge sharing. I can only hope that one day, I will have knowledge to pass along as well.
I left Portland in 2018 and moved back to California with the intention of learning to farm. My experience learning to call dances has been far from the city where I first learned square dancing, but Portland holds a special place in my heart for its seeding the love of dance in me. Where I live now in Santa Cruz, we’ve begun hosting dances again. But the Portland dance scene is still navigating how to return to community dance post-pandemic. The timing of my meetup with Caroline was lucky in that she was about to head to a gathering of other local square dance callers to talk about how to bring square dancing back to Portland after a three year absence. When we arrived at the deli where the meeting was taking place, Caroline greeted the other dance callers as if old friends, probably because they are. Maggie, Steph, and Amy have all been calling square dances in Portland for years. Andy is a newer caller and Mika is a square dance enthusiast there to support the reinvigoration of the dance scene.
The group is gathered around a picnic table out back of a deli cafe in Portland called P’s and Q’s market, a quaint and stylish neighborhood eatery with what looks like a recently crafted, pandemic-friendly back patio. Someone orders fried chicken. There is a jocular attitude and sharing of appetizers and drinks among the group before the real meeting begins. Steph asks, what do we want and how do we make it happen? Everyone has a different idea, but the tone is nothing but generously warm and inclusive. Caroline wants more family-oriented dances for kids. Maggie wants a great caller and a hot band to ensure quality. Mika mentions hosting dances in spaces where queer people feel welcomed, and thinking about ways to include more people of color in the dance scene. Amy wants to be involved, but not in charge. Everyone agrees that the Village Ballroom rental fee is high, and that Velo Cult was a better venue before it closed a few years back.
These are folks who have known each other, played music together, and called dances in community longer than I have ever lived in one place. There is debate and sharing of ideas, grounded in a larger purpose of restoring joy through community music and square dance to Portland. The tenderness and familiarity in their relationships was evident in the stories they shared and the passion with which they spoke about bringing dance back. And yet there was something fragile in the gathering. Bill’s absence was still felt, even after all these years. In addition, Portland’s rapid development and high venue rental costs run counter to the efforts of community dance organizers. And there was somewhat of a sense that the square dance scene in Portland was past its heyday, especially after the silent years of Covid, and this made the effort to bring it back feel exponentially more difficult.
In the park, I asked Caroline what she thinks makes square dancing so special. “In the history of cultures around the world, there’s always music and dance connected. Since time immemorial. Our country is a melting pot. We don’t have deep rooted traditions, even though pieces of it come from all these different places in the world. That’s one thing that really is special about it. I think in our increasingly disconnected way of being in culture together, something where you’re looking people in the eyes, holding hands, where you’re touching, where you’re creating that vulnerability is really important.”
In Caroline’s words, we are at a critical time for community music and dance. People have never been so disconnected from one another, and a square dance is a space where people can join hands and look a stranger in the eye and interact in a way that’s not based on learned values or preexisting identities. When I asked Caroline if she thinks that community square dancing has a role to play in the healing of the world, she shared my sentiments. “The only way we’re ever going to make change with people that think different than us,” she said, “is coming together face to face and having real conversations, and a community dance is a place where stuff like that can happen.”
Wearing a green wool dress I picked up in Portland, I stand on the stage inside the barn at the farm where I work. Dancers have gathered under artfully hung string lights in their Western-wear best, and the smell of warm wood and multigenerational sweat permeates. Outside, ticketing is closed and the clean-up crew is putting dishes away from the community meal. We’re nearing the end of a rollicking night of dance and I am about to begin calling a dance called the Horse Race. I learned the Horse Race from Mike Lewinski, another Santa Cruz caller, who learned it from Bill Martin himself. The Horse Race is always a popular dance because it involves a sashay competition between two couples— a classic party dance in Bill’s style. Before I introduce the dance, I give credit to both of them for passing it down to me. Dancers wait patiently, glancing up and waiting for the music to start. They are all in place to begin: long lines of partners facing one another. The band isn’t ready yet, still debating which tune to play and in which key, so I turn back toward the audience. “We’ll be ready in just a second here. In the meanwhile, turn to your partner... and tell them something you’re grateful for.” There is a brief pause in the barn full of people, and some nervous laughter. Then the space is flooded with conversation, dancers across from one another sharing a few words of gratitude. I see a few couples kiss and figure one of them must have said, you! The band is suddenly ready. They play the first few notes and we are off to dancing.
Bill disrupted the rules and rigidity of square dancing when he put the party first. As we continue to inhabit this pivotal time for community dance, there’s space for more creativity and imagination in what dancing together can look like and accomplish. Caroline actually gave me the idea for bringing vulnerable conversation onto the dance floor. Sharing something we feel grateful for may not solve the political crises of our time, but we are talking with one another in unexpected ways and then dancing together anyway, and it seems to me like there’s something healing in that.
Square dancing is something for us to come home to. It’s a place for people who have never met to meet, to feel connected and to find a sense of belonging in old traditions that are being played and called and danced today. That’s the magic of it for me, and what pushes me to make more spaces for community dance in our world, despite the barriers. If we can join hands in joy and circle onward, we may be able to find each other together once again.
This is wonderful! I am glad you took the time to get it out. I miss the square dances I attended back in the Catskills in the early Seventies, though I was far too cool to ever admit it growing up. I regret that sense of cool and see it as a hindrance to community. Please keep up the good fight writing and calling!