The Progression to Becoming a Caller

When a non-caller thinks about what it takes to be a square dance caller, they usually think of ‘resolution’ (the ability to bring all the dancers back to their home position), and it is certainly true that resolution is an important part of square dance calling, but it turns out it is not the thing you learn first, nor the most important thing. A typical progression is

1. Get over the nerves that you have using a microphone in front of other people and making very public mistakes.
2. Learning and performing a singing call. Working on singing. Your singing call will have a memorized (or read) figure. Getting smooth with that.
3. Learning a few modules (calls that are used together as a group)
4. Learning how to deal with sound, music, applications like CallerBuddy, SqView etc. In other words learning the nuts and bolts of performing on your own (rather than just a guest caller with others’ equipment and music).
5. Learning how to resolve.
6. Learning about flow, hand issues and other subtleties associated with choreography

Thus my advice to beginner callers is to concentrate on the first three (or 4) skills. In particular just learning a singing call and doing it well, is a great (and useful) start.