21 Jul
2013
21 Jul
'13
2:24 p.m.
No advice directly related, but the square dance
community has decreed
that all calls are given in English (much the same way that pretty much
all programming languages have their keywords in English). Kinda rude in
some ways, but it does mean that people can travel to other countries and
still square dance.
An argument can be made that our calls are mostly a mishmash of words
from different languages that don't mean too much and just have to be
memorized. What would be wonderful for non-English speaking
contradancers, would be something like the excellent wiki
http://ruedawiki.org/
that describes in English the moves and the pronunciation of the calls
for Rueda a kind of round dancing of Salsa with calls in English
Spanish and Spanglish
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salsa_Rueda.
Even though contradancing had a long history in the Caribbean, this book chapter
http://www.temple.edu/tempress/chapters_1800/1954_ch1.pdf
does not talk much about the names of the moves, but if I dug deeper
for more information about the largely forgotten contradanza I might
find something useful.