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Squaring Off: The Forgotten Caller in Cape Breton Square Dancing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 January 2019

Heather Sparling
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Square dancing forms a vibrant part of the traditional music scene in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. In addition to the weekly West Mabou square dance, monthly dances and occasional square dances can be found across the island year-round. The number of square dances balloons during the summer months. But quite unlike most other square dance traditions in North America, Cape Breton square dancing rarely features a caller, a person who calls out the movements so that dancers do not have to remember them and can focus instead on performing them, listening to the music, and socializing with other dancers. While callers are generally absent from Cape Breton's square dances today, they were once essential.

Type
Articles
Information
Yearbook for Traditional Music , Volume 50 , 2018 , pp. 165 - 186
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by the International Council for Traditional Music

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Footnotes

1.

I would like to thank Kate Alexander, Amanda Daly Berman, Kristin Harris Walsh, Sherry Johnson, Barbara LeBlanc, Chris McDonald, and Mats Melin for offering feedback and suggestions for improving earlier drafts of this paper. I would especially like to thank Sherry Johnson for suggesting that the decline of the Cape Breton caller may have been tied to the absence of similar calling traditions in other forms of vernacular Scottish dance, and also tied to the rejection of a cultural authority figure. I am also grateful for research funds provided by Cape Breton University and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

References

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