A Square Dance Catch22 (Taken from Callerlink 192 February 2009)
Jeff Garbutt

I was talking with a square dance friend a few months ago about what started him with square dancing and found his experience was remarkably similar to mine. He said that when he was a young lad he was terribly shy and didn’t know how to talk to ladies. And what really attracted him to square dancing was he didn’t have to do that “pluck up the courage to take that long walk across the dance floor to ask a girl” – all he had to do was get into a round up.

Years ago the boys were attracted to square dancing because it was a less stressful way to get a dance with a young lady. As a result there used to be lots of young men in square dancing. It was considered that boys had to make first contact with the girls and the girls never made advances. So for shy young men square dancing was a good “ice breaker”.

In modern times the boys don’t have to work so hard to find a girl – so it is not essential to go to a square dance just to meet a nice young lady. And we are now left with finding different selling points to get people interested in square dancing. (We can’t turn the rules of “the dating game” backwards.)

I have been told many times that young girls are not attracted to square dancing because there are no boys – and I have also been told that young boys aren’t attracted to square dancing because there are no young girls! That sounds a bit like a standard “catch 22”  situation! So how do we win in such a situation? The answer ultimately lies into making use of the situation. Once we start feeding in more young men we attract more young ladies – which in turn will attract more young more young men – which will in turn attract more young ladies etc. The real trick is to start a new trend to kick the process off!