What is a "Wall"?

It's a line dance term that has more than one meaning!

A picture of a brick wall

Last week, we were learning A Bar Song and I was saying "after Wall 10, there are some extra steps..." when a dancer asked, "What do you mean, Wall 10?" And I suddenly thought - excellent question! We use the term Wall without ever really explaining it - and it means different things in different contexts!

1. A typical beginner line dance will be 32 "counts" of music, so four sets of 8 steps. The 32 counts will be known as a Wall. So you might hear me say, "We'll dance the first Wall facing the front..."

2. Walls are then numbered, so we might dance Wall 1 facing the front and Wall 2 facing the back. So in a Bar Song, after we have danced the steps 10 times, so "at the end of Wall 10", there's some extra steps (a "tag").

3. You'll see on dance scripts, dances are usually a "2-wall" or a "4-wall" dance. This refers to the place you start each set of steps. If you always start facing either the front or the back - that's a 2-wall dance. If you could start facing any wall, including the side walls - that's a 4-wall dance.

4. You'll hear me refer to walls of the room as if they were points on a clock face: the front wall is the "12 o'clock wall", the right wall is 3'oclock, the back wall is 6 o'clock and the left wall (as you face the stage) is the 9 o'clock wall. You'll also see this noted in dance scripts e.g. "turn a 1/4 Right (to 3:00)".

5. A "short wall" (you will recognise my hand signal for this) is where we don't dance all the steps before we start the next wall - we will "Restart".

6. What happens when we're dancing a demo outside, e.g. in the circular arena at May Day? There are no actual walls, but it makes no difference, we still dance a wall 1 facing the front.

Clear as mud eh? Sorry about that, but I thought at least writing it down might help you understand this common term.

Have I missed any? Please do comment below!