Our purpose
Capital City Squares is a not-for-profit organization whose pupose is to provide educational, recreational, and social opportunities within the framework of Modern Western square dancing for the gay and lesbian community.
What is Modern Western Square Dancing?
Modern Western square dancing has been a standardized by Callerlab, an organization of square dance callers. For example, the entry level Callerlab program, Mainstream, consists of about 68 calls, including such familiar ones as "dosados," "allemande left," and "right and left grand." Because the dancers are expected to already know the calls on the announced program, teaching is generally not done at a dance. The caller simply calls a sequence of the moves which the dancers are then expected to execute, and a hallmark of Modern Western square dancing is "patter" or "hash," where the caller essentially makes up the dance on the spot with little repetition.
The advantage of attending lessons is that once you know a square dance program, you can dance it anywhere in the world; all of the thousands of Modern Western Square dance clubs adhere to Callerlab standardization. Outside the United States, calling is always done in English.
Callerlab has defined six programs: Mainstream, Plus, Advanced, Challenge-1, Challenge-2, and Challenge-3A. Each of these programs includes all the calls from the prior programs as well. By Advanced and Challenge the dancer is expected to know hundreds of calls and, in addition, concepts, which modify how the calls are executed; dancing at these programs provides mental as well as physical exercise.
The term "IAGSDC" is a trademark of the International Association of Gay Square Dance Clubs. A lesbian and gay organization.