Christopher Schlitter, Caller
As a child in California of 1971, Christopher and his entire family square danced twice a week as members of two clubs. But after two years, his father suffered a serious injury, and the family stopped dancing.
Fast forward to mid-life. Remembering the fond experience of childhood, Christopher convinced his wife, Ri-Shea, to learn to square dance with him at a local club. A few months after finishing lessons, they relocated to North Carolina, and the activities of their teen children kept them off the dance floor.
Five years later in 2009, as brand new empty-nesters, Christopher and Ri-Shea excitedly joined the local club but had to quickly relearn everything they had forgotten, which was almost all the Plus calls starting from Circle Left. The next year, they volunteered as class coordinators, and Christopher began leading weekly supplemental review lessons.
In 2011, at his first state convention, he attended an Intro to Hexagons session, and he was hooked! Every day for the next year, Christopher spent untold waking-and-dreaming hours discovering on his own how to dance, teach, and resolve Hexagons. Then he founded Hexcellent Squares and is perhaps the only caller who started with Hexagons before calling "regular" squares.
Several nights a week, Ri-Shea plays hostess to dancers in their Raleigh home dance hall, while Christopher calls Mainstream through C1...and of course, Hexagons. For the past several years, he has taught and called Hexagons at the Star Spangled Banner Festival in Maryland, Pennsylvania Fabulous Fall Festival, as well as at the North Carolina State Convention. In 2023, he called Hex and C1 at the National Square Dance Convention in Mobile, Alabama.
Christopher teaches and calls Hexagons such that 12 dancers form a 6-sided hexagon and can dance alongside regular squares, hearing the same unchanged call names and dancing per the same definitions, but accounting for the change in geometry. (By definition, Right and Left Grand is still 4 hands.) In 2022 Hexcellent Squares celebrated its 10th anniversary.
