Square Dance Tutorial

GDP for SSD Dancers

Table of Contents
Introduction
Single Circle to a Wave
Walk and Dodge
Diamond Circulate
Cut the Diamond
Spin the Top
Roll
Pass to the Center
Cloverleaf
Ping Pong Circulate
Track 2
Load the Boat
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1: INTRODUCTION

The SCVSDA (Santa Clara Valley Square Dancers Association) General Dance Program is one of several "50 call" programs being used around the world to make square dancing more accessible to beginners. It includes selected calls from the CALLERLAB Basic, Mainstream, and Plus programs. Since each CALLERLAB program is defined to include the preceding ones, the Plus program by definition includes all the calls from the Mainstream and Basic lists. So anybody who already dances Plus can also dance GDP.

Although there are a number of "50 call" programs that are intended to serve a similar purpose, they don't include the same set of calls. They are all subsets of Plus, and they all include the most commonly used calls from Basic, but they vary in which specific other calls they include. Therefore, someone who has learned one of these "50 call" programs will need to learn some additional calls in order to be able to dance a different "50 call" program -- but nowhere near as many as to learn Plus.

Specifically, dancers who have already learned the calls of the SSD list ("Sustainable Square Dancing", sometimes also called "Club 50") only need to learn 11 additional calls in order to dance GDP. The purpose of this tutorial is to introduce those calls to dancers who have already learned the SSD calls.

As with SSD, in addition to including only some of the calls from the CALLERLAB lists, GDP dances also don't make use of as many possible variations of those calls. The descriptions provided here may not cover all of the cases that could come up in a full Plus dance. But they do cover the cases that dancers are expected to know at a GDP dance.

Links are provided on each page to two sources that provide more details, if you want to know more about these calls. If you are planning to learn Plus, these will help you understand about the additional variations used in that program. But if you just want to get started dancing the GDP level, it's fine to skip those for now -- you can always come back and read the rest later.

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