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The first time Marge Henningsen walked into the Waubay Community Center on a Tuesday evening, she was sixty-three years old and convinced she'd make a fool of herself. She'd grown up watching square dancing from the bleachers at county fairs, admiring the precision and laughter but never once believing she belonged on the floor. "I thought you had to be born knowing how to do it," she told me recently, still slightly bewildered by her own transformation. "Turns out you just have to show up."
That willingness to show up is the only real requirement in Waubay. This town of fewer than six hundred people sits in the northeast corner of South Dakota, surrounded by prairie and sky and not much else — the kind of place where community isn't a buzzword, it's survival. And somewhere in that quiet landscape, square dancing didn't just survive. It thrived.
The Community Center: Where It All Begins
The Waubay Community Center Square Dance Club is the heartbeat of the local scene. If you walk through those doors on a Tuesday or Thursday at seven o'clock, you'll find yourself in a gymnasium that's seen better decades — the floor scuffed, the walls bare, a folding table serving punch in the corner. It is not impressive. And yet.
People keep coming back. Week after week, year after year. There's something about the way eight bodies move as one unit — a living, breathing organism that shifts and pivots and reorganizes itself with every call. The callers here aren't professionals. They're neighbors. They learned from the generation before them, and that generation learned from theirs, in an unbroken chain of movement that stretches back further than anyone can precisely remember.
The instructor, Carol Moser, teaches with the patience of someone who genuinely cannot fathom why you'd be nervous. Her approach is simple: everyone starts somewhere. The basic movements — do-si-do, swing your partner, promenade — get broken down and repeated until they live in your muscle memory. By the end of your first hour, you're not thinking anymore. You're just dancing.
Prairie Winds Academy: Structure Meets Soul
If the Community Center is the living room, Prairie Winds Academy is the classroom — and there's real value in that distinction. Located in a converted building on Elm Street that used to house an old grain office, Prairie Winds offers a more methodical approach to the art form.
Sarah Lindgren runs the program with a precision that occasionally frustrates dancers who just want to move freely. But that meticulousness is exactly why Prairie Winds produces some of the strongest dancers in the region. Each call — box the gnat, ladies chain, grand square — gets dissected, analyzed, and drilled until it becomes instinct. Her advanced students can adapt mid-figure, responding to unexpected variations with the fluency of a musician reading chord changes in real time.
The small class sizes are the real gift here. When you have twelve people in a session instead of forty, the instructor notices when you're off timing. She adjusts. She demonstrates. She stands beside you during the difficult transitions and doesn't let you slip into bad habits. For serious learners — people who want to eventually call figures themselves or compete in regional festivals — Prairie Winds is the right environment.
Country Charm: Friday Nights as Community Ritual
Country Charm operates on a different frequency entirely. Their Friday night dances at the Oak Avenue hall have developed a following that extends well beyond Waubay's city limits. People drive in from surrounding towns — Webster, Roslyn, even the small communities across the border in North Dakota — because Country Charm has become something of a regional institution.
What sets these evenings apart is the live music. A local band — three generations of the Ekstrom family, playing fiddle, banjo, and upright bass — provides the soundtrack, and their repertoire leans heavily on the old standards: "Turkey in the Straw," "Cindy," "Old Joe Clark." There's nothing polished about their performances, and that's precisely the point. The slightly imperfect timing, the occasional missed cue, the joy that cracks through every song — it creates a space where imperfection feels not just acceptable but welcome.
Country Charm also runs beginner workshops before the main dances, and the instructors here have a gift for onboarding newcomers without making them feel like outsiders. By the time the live band strikes up, even first-timers are mixing into established squares with a confidence that would have seemed impossible an hour earlier.
The High School Option: Unlikely Venue, Real Results
Here's a secret that surprises most newcomers: some of the most accessible square dance instruction in Waubay happens on Saturday mornings in a high school gymnasium. The Waubay High School program, open to the public and taught by physical education staff, offers weekend classes in a bright, spacious environment that feels radically different from the older community halls.
Linda Pitz runs the sessions with an energy that belies the early hour. She's been teaching these classes for over a decade, and it shows. Linda has a particular talent for working with absolute beginners — people who have never heard the terminology, never executed a proper swing, never tried to remember which direction they're supposed to promenade. Her patience is legendary, and her students' testimonials all mention the same thing: they felt safe to fail here.
The high school gym also has something the older venues lack: excellent spring floors and clean sightlines. Your feet feel the difference. After an hour of dancing here, your body understands the appeal in a way that words can't quite capture.
The Real Reason This Works
Why does square dancing persist in a place like Waubay? The same reason it survived the disco era, the internet age, and every other cultural shift that should have buried it. Square dancing answers a need that hasn't changed in centuries — the need to be physically close to other people, to coordinate with them, to laugh with them when the timing goes sideways and clap when it finally clicks.
In a rural community, that need is especially acute. There's no scene here, no nightlife, no abundance of entertainment options. What there is: a gymnasium, a caller, and eight people willing to trust each other enough to move together. That simplicity is not a limitation. It's the entire point.
You don't need to be athletic. You don't need a partner. You don't even need shoes that match. What you need is the willingness to stand in a square with seven strangers and let the rhythm carry you.
And if you're willing to do that — even once, even awkwardly, even with two left feet — a small town in South Dakota will welcome you in a way that feels like coming home.
