Hip to be square dancing: A once-flourishing scene rises again in the Bay Area

It’s Sunday evening and dozens of people are ping-ponging around the room at Berkeley’s Ashkenaz Music & Dance Community Center. It’s the end of a three-day traveling music festival called “Dare to Be Square West,” and folks are whirling, stomping and otherwise having a ball.

A man who’s perched like a shepherd eyeing his flock calls out instructions from the stage. “Take your partner and promenade!” he hollers, as people form lines, part and reintegrate. “That was backwards – it was beautiful, though,” he says. “Now shoe the buffalo!”

Yes, that innocent activity at which your grandparents might’ve met cute – square dancing – is having a moment here in the Bay Area. This is the first time “Dare to Be Square West” has been held here in more than a decade, and it’s received a raucous reception. When it departs, plenty more local groups will keep the dance going – in all corners of the Bay, put on by clubs with names like the Lucky Steppers, the South Bay Squares and the Oaktown 8s.

The performer on stage right now is named Tony Mates and he came all the way from Seattle to throw down – or rather, hoe-down.

“When I was a boy, we had all kinds of music and it always changed. Rock and roll went from Elvis to the Beatles. Classical music went from Bach to Rachmaninoff,” he tells the crowd. “When I first heard this old-time music, I said to myself, ‘It’s fine the way it is.’ It will change, but there’s just something about it that is so joyous and welcoming, and so unnecessary to try to do anything but ‘get it.’”

More and more people are starting to get it, according to Evie Ladin, an Oakland musician and caller — which is the person who verbally directs square dances. Ladin says these old-fashioned dances are peaking in popularity. Just a few weeks prior, the Ashkenaz Center threw its annual “Lord of the Rings Costume Party Square Dance.” Even Google has had its employees do regular contra dances, Ladin says.

“We’re seeing a serious influx of new dancers and the next generation, like high-school and college students. And it’s really exciting,” she says. “We’ve got a lot of participation from people really wanting something with human contact and that requires little previous knowledge to jump in.”

Mike Pogue is a club caller for the Rockin’ Jokers, which holds weekly dances at the Cambrian Park United Methodist Church in San Jose. “The 1970s, that was really the peak, right? A tremendous number of people learned back then, and there were a huge number of clubs,” says Pogue, who lives in Sunnyvale.

“That tapered down when the Internet showed up, Netflix showed up, and there were a lot of alternatives to square dancing. Then the pandemic came and we lost a tremendous number of dancers who moved to be closer to their kids or to retire,” he says. “The Rockin’ Jokers were down to 30 members around 2021. But now we’re up to about a hundred dancers, so we’re actually coming back.”

It would be hard to kill square dancing, given how ingrained it is in American culture. A style influenced by early English and French settlers, and then by Native Americans and Black slaves, it was made the national folk dance by a 1982 act of Congress. Today almost half the states in the nation claim it as their official dance – including California, which splits it with Western swing – though there are holdouts like Wisconsin (polka) and Hawaii (hula).

Some might say square dancing has an image problem. They might have painful memories of having to do it in grade school, at a point in a child’s development when they have no desire to interact with the opposite sex. It’s been called hokey, a pastime for Appalachian hillbillies and much worse.

“The famous story is that Henry Ford was trying to combat the rise of jazz. He was afraid that African-American culture was going to take over, and so he really promoted square dancing,” says Ladin.

But the truth is it’s enjoyed by many groups. There’s an International Association of Gay Square Dance Clubs and a U.S. Handicapable Square Dance Association. Country-music lovers do it at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry, and nerds do it at MIT for a club called Tech Squares (which does it not just squared but “cubed”).

There’s even a movement to make square dancing gender-neutral, eschewing traditional terms like “gents” and “ladies” for whatever side your partner is on. Ladin sometimes uses “larks” and “robins” for the left and right sides, respectively.

“It is so much fun and the people are so friendly,” says Pogue. “As a caller, I get to tell hundreds of people at a time what to do. So I’m kind of the catalyst, right? I look at it like my goal in life now is to create the maximum number of hours of fun for people.”

Any doubts people might have before hitting the floor are usually dispelled when they enter the main flow of the dance. That’s facilitated by the verbal skills and ingenuity of the caller.

“You’re calling in a way that tells people what to do right before they have to do it, so it just flows really smoothly,” says Ladin. “Sometimes I call it ‘white rapping,’ because there’s a lot of patter that goes along with it. You know, like, ‘circle to the left, circle south, put a little moonshine in your mouth.’ Just things that you’ll say to make it fun and interesting.”

The younger crowd is interested in square dancing for its socializing aspect, says Ladin. Practitioners like to say it’s “friendship set to music.” Aside from being something to do that’s not staring at a screen, casual hookups and even marriages have resulted in strangers partnering up at a square dance. That’s why she refers to the style as “old-time Tinder.”

Beyond that, it’s just a great thing to be part of a human ball – er, square – of energy.

“I keep coming back to connectivity, when people get the impulse and are really moving together,” Ladin says. “It’s just like in a rave, where people feel that” – she mimics an electronics beat, inttzz! inttzz! inttzz! – “and it really releases the endorphins.”

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Want to try it yourself? Regular square dances are held at these times and are open to all dancers:

Third Fridays at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Berkeley; @eastbaysquaredance

Second Fridays at the Polish Club, 3040 22nd St., San Francisco; @feralfridaysquaredance

Rockin’ Jokers gather on Wednesdays at the Cambrian Park United Methodist Church, 1919 Gunston Way, San Jose; rockinjokers.com