Dancers keeping tradition alive
SALMON, Idaho – On any given Friday, a small group of men and women gathers in a hall above a local grocery store to kick up their heels and do-si-do the night away.
Levis and Lace, a Salmon-based, 16-member square dance club, has officially been at it for three decades, but the roots of the dance form stretch into the nation’s deep past.
That American tradition is never far from the mind of Walter Mund, who calls the dances for the local club.
The 73-year-old retired military man has been dancing and cueing other dancers’ movements for more than 40 years.
Mund and other club members decided about five years ago to keep the spirit of the dance alive in Salmon by organizing and hosting the Rocky Mountain Shindig, a regional dance that draws as many as 150 dancers from Idaho and surrounding states.
“You don’t want to see it go down the drain,” Mund said of square dancing, which he says takes a matter of months to learn and a lifetime to perfect.
Unlike ballroom dancing, anyone – even the ungraceful – can master square dancing, Mund said.
“There’s no grace to it,” he said. “You can walk it if you want to. All that’s required is you dress appropriately – skirts for ladies, Western-type wear for men – stay in time with the music and learn a few basic moves.”
That’s a few out of some 10,000 moves. Square dance experts say die-hard dancers end up learning about 150 of those movements, all of which arise from a square with two people on each side.
How moves are orchestrated is up to the caller. It can range from arrangements with such idiosyncratic titles as “swat the flea” and “box the gnat.”
A caller will no sooner allow dancers to get comfortable than shout out a new move. Mund said calling and singing out the movements is still a challenge, even after 30 years.
“It takes guts to be a caller, especially since I’ve never had any musical training,” he said, adding that the chief qualification is to know most of the dance techniques and be an extrovert.
From his longtime study of square dance books and music in his spare time, he knows something the casual viewer of old Westerns may not catch – in almost all movie scenes featuring square dancing, the dancers are not performing the moves the caller is signaling.
Mund said a primary benefit of square dancing, setting aside the rewards that come from any kind of exercise, is that the whole family can join in.