Square Dance

Square dance is also called, folk dance, and has four couples, placed in a square. There is one couple placed on each side. Couple one faces away from the music, going counter-clockwise until getting to couple four, while couples one and three are the head couples. Couples two and four are known as the side couples. The dance starts and ends each sequence with "sets-in-order" in the order of a square. The dance was first related in the 17th century in England, but was also known in France, and is similar to the Scottish Country Dance. Its association was also in the United States due to historic progress in America. There are nineteen U.S. states that consider the dance as their official state dance.

There are different square dance calls as well. The "call" is the name of a specific dance movement.  The "call" is a phrase used by the caller to let the dancers know which dance and which steps or movement of that "call".  Dance means, an event of a person  playing one piece of music, or just dancing. Most calls require anywhere from 4 to 32 "counts" (roughly a step).  With Traditional square dancing the timing is dictated by the tradition. Where as modern Western square dancing, there are many calls give to formally specified durations, based on direct observation of how long it takes a dance to execute then.

Here is one link to check out about the callers, the website is www.callerlab.org. There are other websites you can check out for more about the history of square dance, as well as other types of dancing.