The Canadian Barn Dance

How The Canadian Barn Dance is danced

1. Starting with the outside foot, walk forward three steps and hop or kick.
2. Walk backwards three steps and hop.
3. Skip sideways away from your partner — men towards the centre, ladies towards the edge — for two steps, and clap.
4. Return to your partner and join in ballroom hold.
5. In ballroom hold, skip sideways to the man's left and lady's right for two steps, then back again.
6. Four step-hops to polka anticlockwise round the room.

You do not need to memorise any of this. Garry walks the room through every dance before the music starts and keeps calling all the way through it — the steps are here because some people like to read ahead, not because anybody is expected to arrive knowing them.

What it needs, and who it suits

Formation

Couples round the room, progressive. Simple enough that it can follow the Gay Gordons without asking anything more of the room.

Music

Comfortable, mid-tempo and very regular. Nothing about the music is trying to catch you out.

The room it needs

Any shape. Round the room, gentle progression, no long runs.

For beginners

Genuinely easy. Walk three steps, hop, walk back, clap. If somebody can manage the Gay Gordons they can manage this on the first pass.

Where it falls in the night

Second or third, straight after the opener. Its job is to keep a room that has just got up from sitting down again, and it does that by asking almost nothing of them.

What usually goes wrong

• Skipping the wrong way. Men go towards the centre, women towards the edge. Getting it backwards means meeting somebody unexpectedly.
• Forgetting the clap. Small thing, but it is the marker that keeps the whole room in phase.
• Not returning to ballroom hold in time. The polka section arrives quickly and needs both hands.

Where it comes from

Another twentieth-century sequence dance that became a ceilidh regular. Despite the name, its route into Scottish dance halls is not particularly Canadian and not worth being confident about.