What square dancing is
Modern Western Square Dancing is eight people, one caller, and a piece of music. The eight dancers stand in a square. The caller names a movement — a call — and the dancers do it, together, without being told in advance what is coming next. The caller then names another. And another. The dance continues until the figures bring everyone back to where they started.
That is the whole idea. Everything else in this book is detail.
What it is not
It is not a dance you learn as a fixed routine. There is no sequence to memorise, because the caller decides the sequence live. What you memorise is a vocabulary of calls — around fifty of them in the Mainstream program — and the skill of hearing one and doing it without thinking.
This is why square dancing is taught as a language. A call is a word. A formation is a grammatical position. The conventions in 03-rules are the grammar that removes ambiguity when a word could mean two things.
What an evening is like
An evening is a series of tips — see Tips, the unit of the dance. Each tip is a few minutes of dancing to one piece of music, and there are usually six to ten tips in a night. Between tips you find a new square, and it does not matter who you get: the calls work from any arrangement of the eight positions.
You will dance with strangers and friends, you will swap partners many times inside a single tip, and you will finish the evening tired and, usually, laughing.
Come as you are
Modern square dancing has no dress code for learning. Comfortable shoes and clothes you can walk in are the whole requirement. Traditional dress exists in some clubs; ask before you turn up in it.
Dancers are not required to bring a partner. Squares need eight, and clubs balance numbers as people arrive.
The 2026 change — important if you have danced before
If you are returning to square dancing, or reading older material, you need to know that the program changed.
In 2025 CALLERLAB's membership voted to replace the previous Basic, Mainstream and SSD programs with a single Mainstream Dance Program of 50 calls or call families. The new program, and the teaching order that goes with it, took effect on 1 September 2026.
Two consequences you will notice:
- Some calls you know are no longer Mainstream. They have moved up. The Plus program — see Where Mainstream leads — absorbed some of them, and a few left the taught programs altogether. Moved and renamed lists them.
- The teaching order changed. If you learned before 2026, the order you learned in is not the order in this book. The calls are largely the same ones; the route through them is not.
Where to go next
- the eight positions, and the words for them → The square
- your first call, right now → Your first call
- how a call is put together → How a call works