SPECTACLES: Hip Squares

First couple out to the right, Circle half and don’t you blunder, Inside arch and the outside under, Dip in and you dive and don’t be slow.

Police kept dipping and diving last week in Denver, where 10,000 do-se-doers assembled for the eighth annual National Convention of Square Dancers. On two days the cops roped off Denver’s 16th Street, and through most of the week the frisky conventioneers roped off all the city’s ballroom and dance-floor space—including shopping centers—to romp for 13½ hours a day through the Paul Jones, the Sicilian Circle, the Soldier’s Joy.

The traditional cry for a man when he arrived at the barn dance with his jug of redeye used to be: “I’m a she-wolf and it’s my night to howl.” For a while, in the early 20th century, the wolf howls seemed to be drowned out by ragtime and its successors; square dancing was not revived in a big way until the 1930s, when the late Dr. Lloyd Shaw formed a dance school in Colorado Springs, organized the famed Cheyenne Mountain Dancers. Since then, square dancing has grown every year as popular entertainment, with about 10,000 callers now active (the best of them make as much as $150 a night) and two dozen record companies providing recorded calls. There are an estimated 1,000,000 serious square-dance buffs in the U.S., as dedicated to learning the intricacies of the ladies’ chain or the left-hand star as any Arthur Murray graduate student is to the mastery of the cha cha cha.

Last week’s Denver convention showed that the modern square dance has long since stopped stomping, clogging and jigging (redeye is still optional), has become a forceful matter of sliding steps and intricate patterns. Dancers came from as far away as Germany and Great Britain, and from 46 U.S. states, most of them young married couples or spry middle-aged folk. Most impressive proof that square dancers are not square but hip: George (“Pop”) Singer, who last week was energetically chassezing right and allemanding left at the age of 91.