Tech Squares Fun Stuff

Hacks, Tips, and Rounds

Here are a few noteworthy hacks, tips, and round dances written by Tech Squares members and presented at dances. There are others; if anyone has copies, please send them in.

Riddle Sequence
I'll give you hints; you figure out the calls. (David Resnick)
M-I-T T-E-C-H
The first (and only) singing call written especially for Tech Squares. (Ted Lizotte)
The Masochism Tango
A round dance to the popular Tom Lehrer song. (Doris T-Bow)

Tech Squares in the Press

The Tech

Guy Steele tells how he was introduced to Tech Squares and why he enjoys dancing.

Slice of MIT

MIT's Alumni Association's Blog, Slice of MIT, featured Tech Squares as a leadup to the 50th Anniversary Weekend.

Spectrum

MIT's Spectrum newsletter did an article about Tech Squares in their Summer 2003 issue.  While the club is pleased by the media exposure, this piece does not present Tech Squares accurately.

Newsweek

In 1994, Newsweek's then-new Cyberscope Trends feature listed Tech Squares as one of the spots where Techies get F2F time.  Must be willing to do-si-do, they noted.

Newsweek, September 5, 1994, p. 10.

Rolling Stone

Tech Squares isn't mentioned by name here, but MIT does have several challenge dance groups, and they grew out of Tech Squares.  The caller and founder of Stanford's club are both Tech Squares alums.

Hot Geek Scene: Challenge Square Dancing

Square dancing at the challenge level is more like a fast-moving game of chess than a hoedown.  The attire is running shoes and shorts; the locale is typically urban (with lively scenes near high-tech academic centers like Stanford and MIT); the music could be anything from Broadway to techno; and the aim is to perform mind-bogglingly complex maneuvers on cue, following the rapid-fire instructions of the designated caller.  When nobody's screwing up, the choreography can mesmerize - like a Rubik's Cube in graceful motion.  Challenge dancing is square dancing taken to its puzzle-solving extreme, wrote longtime caller Lynette Bellini on her Web page (www.challengedance.org).  She recommends the activity to anyone with a bent for algorithmic thinking and problem solving, and notes that about 75 to 80 percent of challenge dancers have high-tech backgrounds.  Not that everyone who challenge-dances crunches algorithms for a living, of course.  But then, not everyone who discoed in the '70s was a gay man, nor was every '80s break dancer an inner-city teen.

By Julian Dibbell from Rolling Stone, August 21, 1997, p. 76.  Copyright © 1997 by Straight Arrow Publishers Company, L.P.  All rights reserved.  Reprinted by permission.

Up the Infinite Corridor

Fred Hapgood dropped by a challenge square dancing group at MIT.  He wrote about what he saw in his 1993 book Up the Infinite Corridor(This excerpt is long enough to get its own Web page.)