Re: [Callers] How to call a Petronella Turn?

I feel kind of stuck in perpetuating the use of the term "Petronella". I'll use it in the walkthrough because that orients the experienced dancers immediately and than call "spin" or "twirl" and probably keep calling "make a ring and balance now" longer than than I call the twirl.) I think it's courteous to the newer dancers to identify how the figure is commonly called so they'll have a chance of knowing it the next time somebody else calls it, but it certainly is just about the most undescriptive name possible. Scottish dancing also has a "Petronella turn" - not surprisingly, since the chestnut contra seems to derive from something published in Edinburgh by Gow in, uh, 1820 or something - but it is different in detail from the contra one. (And in the Scottish dance, the actives only do the Petronella move first, then balance (pas-de-basque) in place.) Dudley Laufman wrote some time back that the chestnut contra had the same thing as the Scottish - just the actives traveling - until somebody imported the all-in-and-out all-travel-twirling from an English trad dance called Roxburgh Castle (which uses a rant step, incidentally). So the whole BTR-Petronella-turn thing is completely a 20th-century invention in contra dancing. [Not that this is directly responsive to the original question; I just think it's interesting.] -- Alan On 11/23/2012 1:30 PM, Rich Goss wrote: