The SaddleBrooke Square Dance Club at the Yuma, Arizona 2018 Square Dance Festival
Bob White
This could be YOU in this picture!
As a member of the SaddleBrooke Square Dance Club Class of 2018 joining your new friends and fellow dancers at the Yuma, Arizona 2018 Square Dance Festival.
This festival will be your opportunity to put to the test all those weeks of lessons and practice and skills and memorization of 15 weeks of mainstream square dance calls. You will be thinking back to that evening in October 2017, October 8 to be exact, when you joined in for a demonstration of square dancing called “Give Us A Whirl” (GUAW). This was followed by 15 weeks of lessons, each week getting better and better as the calls and steps are practiced and memorized until they became as second nature as walking, or dare I say riding a bike.
The lessons were supplemented by visits to the club’s website SaddleBrookesquares.com where each lesson could be previewed as well as reviewed before and after the lessons. Also a peek into YouTube showed all kinds of calls and venues to further help you advance up the learning curve as well as providing entertaining music and videos displaying the good time folks are having at various dances and festivals both locally and all across Arizona and farther.
Your fellow students are from HOA One and HOA2 as well as the Robson Ranch. There could have also been a few guest students attracted to the lessons by the reputation of the “Squares” caller Larry Kraber, a fellow SaddleBrooke resident.
The Yuma festival comes very timely at the end of the 14 weeks of mainstream lessons making it possible for you to dance with other mainstream graduates attending the festival. But your lessons now move ahead to “Plus” calls. Plus calls put together the different calls from mainstream, which adds to the fun and smooth flow of more advanced calls such as “Load The Boat,” “Spin Chain and Exchange the Gears,” or “Flip the Diamond.” The Plus calls are taught following mainstream and consist of nine lessons. Once completed a feeling of accomplishment will make the effort all the more worthwhile, and you can now go anywhere and dance. English is the universal language of square dance callers.
There could not be a better time to take the lessons. The GUAW is on October 8 followed this year by two evenings of free dance lessons, October 15 and 22. Larry will have teaching assistants called TAs at every lesson to help guide you over any rough spots. Some like to call these TAs, Teaching Angels, but let it be known that helping others learn the steps helps the TAs improve their own dancing both in memory and in doing the “Do-C-Do.”
So there you have it, back to present time; if you want more information call Bob White at 520-818-9482 or reach him or Kay at [email protected] or email our class coordinator Randy Regnier at [email protected] or the website www.saddlebrookesquares.com.