The named exercises included the square order shuffle, danced in ranks moving forward and back; the circular or round dance, in which concentric rings moved in opposite directions with a group of singers standing still at the centre; and marches of various figures that filled the meeting room floor. Men and women danced separately and faced each other across the room, in keeping with a society that was celibate and that separated the sexes in nearly everything. There were no instruments. The Shakers sang, and the singers carried the beat for everyone else.
The period from about 1837 to the 1850s, which the Shakers called the Era of Manifestations, brought a wave of received songs, drawings and dances attributed to spirits, including songs said to come from Native American, African and other spirits and sung in what the receivers understood to be their languages. Simple Gifts, written at Alfred in Maine in 1848 and now the best known Shaker song in the world, comes from this period, and its text is a dance instruction as much as a hymn: to turn is the point of it.
Membership fell steadily from the later nineteenth century as the celibate community stopped receiving new members in numbers. The village at Sabbathday Lake in Maine is the last, and it is very small.