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Last summer, I watched a room full of twenty-somethings lose their minds over something their great-grandparents were doing a century ago. We were at a community center in rural Virginia, the kind of place with fluorescent lights and folding chairs that probably haven't been replaced since the Reagan administration. On the speaker: the Virginia Reel. On the dance floor: a crowd that looked like someone had rolled a genie bottle the wrong direction.
And they loved it.
That's when it hit me—square dancing isn't coming back. It never left. We just stopped paying attention.
The resurgence everyone keeps writing about isn't some nostalgic fever dream. It's happening in gymnasiums and community centers and wedding receptions across the country, driven by people who discovered these dances through grandparents, YouTube rabbit holes, or that one friend who won't shut up about folk festivals. The structured turns, the caller's commands, the satisfying snap of eight people moving in perfect unison—there's something almost meditative about giving your body over to a pattern someone else designed decades ago.
The Virginia Reel opens like this: two lines facing each other, partners at the top, everyone else stacked along the sides. The caller says "forward and back," you walk, and suddenly you're not thinking about your rent or your to-do list or that text you forgot to respond to. You're watching feet. You're counting. You're laughing when you mess up because everyone messes up and that's part of the deal. The dance moves through the line like a wave, partners trading places, Do-si-dos happening in rapid succession, and by the time you reach the end you've executed about thirty moves without ever feeling overwhelmed. That's the magic of the Virginia Reel—it's complex enough to feel like an accomplishment, simple enough that your brain can actually quiet down.
The Caledonians is where things get interesting if you've got a competitive streak. This Scottish square dance demands footwork that will make you respect dancers from Edinburgh in a way you didn't before. Quick stamps, precise arm movements, a tempo that doesn't wait for you to catch up—the whole thing feels like a conversation between your body and the music, rapid-fire, accented, alive. I watched a group of college students attempt it last fall and spend the entire first song saying "wait, which foot again?" By the third song, they'd locked in. The sense of accomplishment on their faces was almost worth the fifteen minutes of watching them stumble around.
The Promenade is the sophisticated older sibling. Think of it as the dance that teaches you how to be in relationship with other people on a floor—how to lead without taking over, how to follow without giving up your own momentum. Partners move together, circling, spinning, weaving through set patterns that require both trust and attention. It's the one you'll see at formal events, the dance people bring out when they want to impress, the one that photographs beautifully because everyone looks like they know exactly what they're doing and care about each other doing it too.
The Texas Star is pure geometry disguised as recreation. Four couples start in a square, and as the dance progresses, they literally become a star—arms extended, bodies turning, the pattern expanding and contracting like breathing. It's visually stunning, which is probably why it's become the gateway dance for so many social media-savvy young dancers who discovered it through TikTok and wanted to know what was actually happening. The call is patient, building from simple moves to the full star turn, and when you finally lock into that final position there's a moment where every person in the set is connected by nothing but their reach.
The Grand Square is the one that keeps you humble and keeps you coming back. Forty-eight steps, none of them particularly complicated in isolation, but chained together they create a journey around the square that feels like a lifelong friendship—comfortable, reliable, a little bit unpredictable in the best way. You can dance it to country, to pop, to whatever the caller decides to load onto their mp3 player. It welcomes everyone, teaches everyone, sends everyone home slightly better at dancing than they arrived.
Walking away from that community center last summer, I asked a sixteen-year-old what drew her to this. She shrug-turned-smile was the entire answer, but she added: "It's the only time my phone is face-down and I'm not thinking about anything else."
That's the thing about these dances. They don't compete with your phone or your streaming services or your carefully curated social life. They offer something those things can't—a room full of strangers becoming a room full of people who just did something hard together and are probably going to do it again. The caller keeps calling, the floor keeps holding, the music keeps moving, and somehow that simple repetition becomes the point.
The old-timers at these dances—the ones who've been doing this for fifty years—have seen trends come and go. They've watched disco rise and fall, line dancing spike and settle, yoga pants conquer everything. And through it all, they've kept showing up to the hall, lacing up their dance shoes, waiting for the next generation to discover what they're already addicted to.
Maybe that discovery is finally here. Maybe we got tired of dancing alone in front of screens. Maybe—and this is the theory I keep coming back to—the structured chaos of traditional square dancing offers something our algorithm-driven lives can't: the comfort of knowing exactly what comes next, the joy of executing it beautifully with other people, and the rare gift of being fully present in a room full of humans without the exit option in your pocket.
Your grandmother probably tried to teach you. She wasn't wrong.
