a square through is done along the imagined lines that bound the perimeter of the square formed by the 2 couple minor set. A cross trail forms an "x" pattern similar to the beginning of a 1/2 figure 8 -------------------------------------------- On Sun, 12/29/13, Ron Blechner <contraron(a)gmail.com> wrote: Subject: Re: [Callers] Square through vs Cross-trail To: "Caller's discussion list" <callers(a)sharedweight.net> Date: Sunday, December 29, 2013, 7:23 PM I thought "square through" did not specifically include the balances. I learned that with the balances, it's called "interrupted square through". As I understand, cross trails is without hands, and square through is with hands. Am I mistaken? -Ron http://contradances.tumblr.com/ron On Sun, Dec 29, 2013 at 8:13 PM, David Harding <dharding101(a)comcast.net>wrote;wrote: square through and then a pull through, to whom you have pulling by, and usually repeated to put you without touching hands, started. catalog, but it's not these two figures, if in my collection but they dance we'd call "2 hands to the person depending on where the dance person in your minor set P).  And in ECD those 2 of across, which I haven't yet encountered it. glossary of contra _______________________________________________ Callers mailing list Callers(a)sharedweight.net http://www.sharedweight.net/mailman/listinfo/callers

On 12/30/2013 01:58, James Saxe wrote: Great explanation, Jim. The one additional detail I would add is that a square through 3, 4, or 5 hands is choreographically different from a cross-trail through. Thanks, Bob

On Mon, 30 Dec 2013 07:47:33 -0800 (PST), rich sbardella wrote: The Belgian Connection A1: Heads forward and back. Cross trail through, round one to the middle of a line of four. A2: Lines forward and back. All cross trail through. B1: Swing (original partner), put her on your right. Everyone is half-way round the square. Head ladies chain across. B2: Head ladies chain to the right. Promenade new partner to the man's place (half-way round). The ladies have moved one place to their left. Colin Hume -- Squares with a Difference, Volume 2, 2004

I can't imagine how 2 folks could give/use hands while crossing each other's trails since the movement direction of a cross trail is like an "X"...on the diagonal as opposed to straight across/up and down like a square thru -------------------------------------------- On Mon, 12/30/13, Aahz Maruch &lt;aahz(a)pobox.com&gt; wrote: Subject: Re: [Callers] Square through vs Cross-trail To: callers(a)sharedweight.net Date: Monday, December 30, 2013, 11:09 AM On Mon, Dec 30, 2013, rich sbardella wrote: substitute star thru If you want to get nitpicky with the no-hands of cross trail thru ;-), change star thru to slide thru.  (But few non-square dancers would know slide thru.) -- Hugs and backrubs -- I break Rule 6                        http://rule6.info/                       <*>           <*>           <*> Help a hearing-impaired person: http://rule6.info/hearing.html _______________________________________________ Callers mailing list Callers(a)sharedweight.net http://www.sharedweight.net/mailman/listinfo/callers

Yes, "crosstrail"  is simply a "pass thru" with the partners crossing trails... to end up facing out of a square and back to back with the passed thru couple.  If the caller's next call is "U Turn Back"  the 2 calls equal  a "Right & Left Thru". But it was most commonly used by callers as a crosstrail to the corner for an allemande left or crosstrail, separate, round one, cross (your) trails (from a 1/2 sashayed position) to your corner, etc. Bob Livingston Middletown, CT On Tuesday, December 31, 2013 1:32 AM, Andrea Nettleton &lt;twirly-girl(a)bellsouth.net&gt; wrote: I don't think a cross trail is an X, but I would say that there is still a difference in foot path between a cross trail and a star through to pass through and that is that unless explicitly told not to, dancers will do a pass thru with the right shoulder, whereas a cross trail, as danced in contras, is a pass thru by the R, turn and pass by the left.  In trad squares, cross trail sometimes consists of a pass through followed by something like an x, but there would still be two moments when hand contact is possible, first Rs, the Ls.  My club squares caller would have a cow if anyone danced a cross trail as anything but a pass thru and half sashay.  Andrea Sent from my iPad _______________________________________________ Callers mailing list Callers(a)sharedweight.net http://www.sharedweight.net/mailman/listinfo/callers

On Tue, Dec 31, 2013, Andrea Nettleton wrote: and on Dec 31, 2013, at 8:01 PM, Aahz Maruch replied: In my earlier message (Dec 29, 2013, at 10:58 PM), I (Jim Saxe) had written about Cross Trail Thru historically having involved a curving action. I also emphasized that I was omitting details. Here are some of the omitted details. * * * * * * * * * * The current CALLERLAB definition of "Cross Trail Thru" says: From facing couples: As one smooth motion, Pass Thru and Half Sashay. Ends in couples back-to-back. Note: When one hears "Cross Trail Thru To Your Corner; Allemande Left", the Cross Trail Thru is danced, as one smooth motion, Pass Thru and left-shoulder Partner Tag. [For those unfamiliar with the term "Partner Tag", the definition is From a couple or mini-wave, dancers turn to face each other and pass thru. (where a "couple" means a pair of dancers side by side facing the same direction, regardless of whether they are original partners, and even regardless of their gender roles). I'm only mentioning this to explain the note in the definition above. I can't think of any reason for a contra caller or a traditional square caller to utter the phrase "partner tag" to dancers, and I think there's ample reason to avoid it in favor of more descriptive terminology.] The main part of the definition above (excluding the special case "Cross Trail Thru To Your Corner; Allemande Left") is what Andrea and Aahz are referring to. However, the term "Cross Trail Thru" (or "Through") entered the square dance lexicon over sixty years ago (I've seen sources that date it to 1940 and others suggesting it's from a few years later), in an era when definitions were much less codified than they are in Modern Western Square Dancing (MWSD) today. It is also a term about which there has been a good deal of controversy over the years, with some callers insisting it should be defined to end with facing in original directions (as in the current CALLERLAB definition) and others saying that it involves a curving action or that the ending position depends on the next call. Additionally, some historic definitions also say that if dancers are already facing out, they can do the call without the initial "Pass Thru". There's also a version with an "active" and an "inactive" couple, where the actives cross diagonally through the inactives and the inactives essentially stay put. I think this last version may be what Jean Francis had in mind when writing (in a message posted Dec 29, 2013, at 7:18 PM): A cross trail forms an "x" pattern similar to the beginning of a 1/2 figure 8 One source I've found says that if the call is started from couples with ladies on the left of the gents, then it is still the ladies who cross in front. Most sources, if they mention varied gender arrangements at all, say that it is always the dancer originally on the right in each couple who crosses in front of the dancer originally on the left, regardless of gender. * * * * * * * * * * I could quote descriptions of Cross Trail Thru (and variant call names) as published in a variety of sources over the years, but to keep this message from becoming a good deal longer that it's already getting to be, I'll simply suggest that readers who want to get some sense of the controversy over the definition take a look at the following pages in old issues of _Sets In Order_ magazine: * Vol. IX, No. 5, May 1957, p. 11 [Note: "Pattison" is misspelled as "Patterson".] * Vol. XXIII, No. 5, May 1971, p. 15 * Vol. XXV, No. 6, June 1973, pp. 16-17 * Vol. XXIX, No. 10, October 1977. p. 15 The complete run of the magazine is available online at http://digitaldu.coalliance.org/fedora/repository/codu:59239 * * * * * * * * * * Based on the current CALLERLAB definitions document, it's clear which faction in this controversy won out in the MWSD world. My impression is that a significant number of the dissenters were not whole-heartedly won over to the prevailing view, but merely outvoted, and that discord over the call was a big part of what led to it being dropped from the Basic list 20 years ago and moved to Advanced. Given the nature of MWSD, I can see why many callers would prefer call definitions that leave dancers facing definitely parallel or definitely at right angles to original directions over definitions that involve smoothly curving turns and vague dependencies on subsequent calls. But "Cross Trail Through" dates from a time before the divide between MWSD and "traditional" SD was nearly as great as it is today, and the call has found its way into "traditional" side of the SD activity via callers who picked it up back in those days and more recent "traditional"-style callers who learned from them. And "traditional"-style callers haven't been driven by MWSD's need for precision about call definitions (including facing directions), nor have we felt obliged always to follow CALLERLAB's decisions about call definitions. * * * * * * * * * * An example of a dance sequence using "Cross Trail" in a way that could make a current MWSD caller (especially one who only got involved in SD within the past decade or two) have a cow is Dick Leger's singing call "Marianne". See http://www.ceder.net/recorddb/viewsingle.php4?RecordId=4599&SqlId=258026 for cue sheet; see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pf9Kt5t4QhM for the called version of Leger's 1957 recording; and see videos of the dance here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPk23ME75rA http://squaredancehistory.org/items/show/778 [This page says Leger claimed that "Marianne" was the best-selling square dance record of all time.] The callers in the videos--Tony Parkes and David Millstone--don't use Leger's exact call wordings, but I believe the choreography is the same as Leger intended. As another example, consider this fragment from the dance "Trailin' Star" by Jim York: ... [From lines of four, M1-W1-M4-W4 facing M3-W3-M2-W2 (reading L to R in each line):] Go forward and back and step it light Then cross trail thru--Gents star right Gals promenade till you hear me sing-- Reverse the Star--reverse the ring Pass her twice and don't be late, Gals step in behind your date It's a left hand up and star all eight ... (For the full dance, see SIO, Vol. VI, No. 5, May 1954, p. 21.) * * * * * * * * * * I think there are a couple points to be taken from all this that go beyond details about the history of "Cross Trail Thru". First, it's the general nature of things folkloric that the version of something you first encountered is not necessarily the one and only way it was back into the dim past. Second, if you have occasion to go searching for dance material in old books, magazines, etc., beware of assuming that familiar terms used by the authors have exactly the meanings that are familiar to you. It may take a bit of work to figure out the intended choreography. And if you find something you think you can use, it may take some work--and some good judgment--to decide whether and how to adjust the choreography and/or the call terminology to best suit your intended audience. --Jim

In my recent long message about the history of "Cross Trail Thru", I mentioned that the complete run of _Sets In Order_ (a/k/a _Square Dancing_) magazine has been put online and is accessible at: http://digitaldu.coalliance.org/fedora/repository/codu:59239 I think this is a terrific resource, and not only for those of us interested in historical minutiae. Especially in the first ten years or so of publication, there were lots of dances either suitable for use or easily adapted for use by "traditional"-style square callers. On Jan 7, 2014, at 3:48 PM, Jonathan Sivier wrote: I don't think large chunks are missing, but they are indeed sorted into a very strange order. Issues within the volumes are generally sorted "alphabetically" by number: 1, 10, 11, 12, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 And the volumes are in a weird and irregular order First Vols. 1, 10-15 then the isolated number Vol. 17, No. 12 then Vols. 18, 19, 2, 21, 3-9, 16, then the rest of Vol. 17 then Vols. 22-37 Jonathan is correct that attempting to access the March 1955 issue gets you to the March 1954 issue. I don't know how many errors of this sort there are or where to report this one. There's a box labeled "Search within titles", but it doesn't work for me. I'm running Safari, Version 5.0.6. I'd be interested in knowing whether that search box works for people running other browsers. Clicking the tab labeled "Advanced Search" gets you to http://digitaldu.coalliance.org/advanced_search Queries there search a larger corpus of which the _Sets In Order_ collection is only a part. To keep search results from getting polluted with lots of irrelevant hits, you can search for "Sets In Order" in "Titles" together with some other phrase in "Full Text". Once you have a single issue displayed in your browser (or downloaded and displayed in a PDF viewer), the PDF is full-text searchable. The OCR seems generally to be pretty good, though some text in unusual fonts or white-on-black (as in some of the headings and some of the ads) hasn't been scanned. --Jim

Two things.  Cross trail was no hands in 1990 when I learned it as a Mainstream club dancer.  In the Text below, it should read "instead of facing their corner." (not their caller) ________________________________ From: rich sbardella &lt;richsbardella(a)snet.net&gt; To: Caller's discussion list &lt;callers(a)sharedweight.net&gt; Sent: Wednesday, January 1, 2014 1:47 AM Subject: Re: [Callers] Square through vs Cross-trail Andrea, Cross trail was removed from Basic/Mainstream program many years ago, and as I understand it, it was because callers could not, or would not agree on a definition.  When I learned it, as a club dancer, from facing couples, it was a pass thru, then the right hand dancer , of each facing couple, would cross in front of the left hand dancer.  the left hand dancer would then cross behind the right hand dancer.  The pass thru part was straight across, followed by the X movement.  I have danced that pattern in contras.  When I said you can use star thru then pass thru, it only works in some applications.  One would be Heads Cross Trail to your corner for an allemande left.  Star thru, pass thru, would accomplish the same thing.  Pass thru with a half sachay, leaves the couples facing out, instead of facing their caller.  The latter may be a definition that was assigned for a Callerlab program in more recent years.  I like the flexibility of the older usage, but today a walkthrough might be necessary. Rich PS  I's still looking for some square dance figures with cross trail thru. ________________________________ From: Andrea Nettleton &lt;twirly-girl(a)bellsouth.net&gt; To: Caller's discussion list &lt;callers(a)sharedweight.net&gt; Sent: Tuesday, December 31, 2013 1:32 AM Subject: Re: [Callers] Square through vs Cross-trail   I don't think a cross trail is an X, but I would say that there is still a difference in foot path between a cross trail and a star through to pass through and that is that unless explicitly told not to, dancers will do a pass thru with the right shoulder, whereas a cross trail, as danced in contras, is a pass thru by the R, turn and pass by the left.  In trad squares, cross trail sometimes consists of a pass through followed by something like an x, but there would still be two moments when hand contact is possible, first Rs, the Ls.  My club squares caller would have a cow if anyone danced a cross trail as anything but a pass thru and half sashay.  Andrea Sent from my iPad _______________________________________________ Callers mailing list Callers(a)sharedweight.net http://www.sharedweight.net/mailman/listinfo/callers _______________________________________________ Callers mailing list Callers(a)sharedweight.net http://www.sharedweight.net/mailman/listinfo/callers