Tractor Tavern, Century Ballroom host square dances for new generation

On a Monday, the lights are up inside one of Ballard's best-loved watering holes. The better not to step on your dance partner's toes — not that you'll be entirely able to avoid it. A sizable crowd has braved the chill of an early fall night to go square dancing. While attendees appear to range in age from 21 to early 50s, they skew young and attractive, and a Joan Jett T-shirt is as apt an accessory as a cowboy hat.

Ballard Avenue — so popular as a nightlife destination that some have started calling it "Ball-town" — is largely sleeping as the Tractor Tavern starts stomping, clapping and hollering. Twice a month, The Tallboys (a self-professed "old time string band") and their special guests provide the soundtrack for an event called Monday Square Dance.

A different "caller" — who speaks over the music with dance explanations and cues — accompanies the band at each event. Don't know how to promenade? No problem.

"I like to sing my calls, and I want people to figure out the dance," says the caller on this particular night, Suzanne Girardot.

As she announces the next dance, five or six squares begin to form on the floor. Each square requires four sets of couples; those that are short will raise one or two fingers in the air to signify that they're incomplete. While it may take some bravery to volunteer, it's worth it.

Once everyone is in place and new dance steps are explained, Girardot instructs the ladies and gents to "Bow to your partner," and "Bow to your corner." And you're off! Soon you're being swung by someone, do-sa-do'd by someone else, spun around by someone faster than the previous person, and met in the middle by the entire square as they yell "Whoo!" Occasionally, the dance will dissolve as people forget or miss moves, but come back together by the song's end.

"It's the most fun when it all becomes chaos," says participant Joshua Powell, who also happens to be program director of the all-ages music venue at Seattle Center, the Vera Project.

Sure, you can drink while dancing (a friend of Powell's fashioned a beer harness for his belt in order to swig between steps) but relative sobriety is helpful in navigating the patterns and following calls.

Girardot's cadence enhances the rollicking, up-tempo style of The Tallboys. She points to their rhythm guitarist, Charmaine Slaven, as the driver of Monday Square Dance's success. Slaven facilitates conversation and events with local "old time" music enthusiasts via a mailing list of nearly 400; she's a key member of the Seattle Subversive Square Dance Society, or S4 — a group devoted to spreading the joys of the social dance form through community events and house dances.

Slaven has been playing with the Tallboys since 2003. The Tractor's owner, Dan Cowen, invited the band to do dances after seeing them play on Ballard's streets in '05.

"The Tractor used to be called the New Melody, and there was a long-running square dance there through the '80s," says Slaven. Some callers, such as Seattle's Tony Mates, have been calling dances there on and off for decades.

Slaven is a buckdancer — a term describing a solo percussive dance that has roots in tap dancing, Irish, African and Native-American dance styles — who'll get up to improv during a show.

"I love the diversity of people we have showing up to square dance — there seems to be lots of new dancers every time, which keeps the energy high," says Slaven.

"It's a great way to bring the community together. It's not often that you get an opportunity to hold a stranger's hand and pull them through a bunch of silly figures — you can't help but laugh and have a good time."

She's unsure where all the dancers are coming from, but a recently christened Urban Square Dance night at Capitol Hill's Century Ballroom accounts for at least some of the crowd. Ballroom owner Hallie Kuperman said in an e-mail that about 70 people turned out for that venue's inaugural event, and "It was SOOOOO FUN! I don't think I've ever sweated and laughed that much while dancing." The Century's next Urban Square Dance is scheduled for Dec. 3.

Some dancers at the Tractor, like Rhesa Bubbel, heard about the night from friends. "I've never felt so comfortable dancing in a big group of people before," she says.

Gabe Strand, one of the organizers of S4, cites this social aspect as one of the activity's big draws.

"Square dancing is sort of an anachronistic novelty at first," he wrote in a recent e-mail exchange. "But what I notice at the Tractor dances is that people always say to me, 'Wow, it's like you can just walk up to anyone and ask them to dance. It's not a big deal.' In fact, square dancing demands that you dance with just about everybody else in the room at some point in the night. I think people like that, it's refreshing."

Also refreshing is the lack of competitiveness in square dancing. "There's no pressure to be the best dancer in the room like maybe there is with salsa or swing," Strand says.

Beyond that, he notes, there's a certain plain beauty to the old-time music and dance steps, and how they mirror each other: "I know when I started I was impressed with the symmetry in square-dance figures; it is very satisfying when you learn a new dance and it all comes together."