[Callers] Etymology of "Sicilian Circle"

Thanks to all those who responded. I now have enough information to give the Sicilian lady a different answer every week and thoroughly confuse her :-) I sent the request to four discussion groups - I have listed them at the bottom of the note in case anyone wants to join the other groups. Here are the replies to the question: Why is the formation known as a "Sicilian Circle"? = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Tim Brooks: Cos' it's a dansa you canta refusa? = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Hanny Budnick: I have no idea where I read it, but apparently the "Sicilian" circle started out as "Caecilian" circle, named in honor of St. Caecilia, the muse of music. = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Ramsay John Martin: I don't KNOW the answer, but I do have an hypothesis. English dances had men on the left and ladies on the right. I was told in Sweden that this is a custom which came from the practice of the men taking the warm south side of cathedrals during gatherings with the women relegated to the cold north. Thus, after marriage, and the newlyweds turned to face the congregation, the man was on the left and the lady on the right. Regardless of the reality of this reasoning, the English dances did have the sexes divided. The Spanish waltz instead had the alternate pattern-what many of us call a Sicilian Circle formation. Several dance manuals in the last half of the 19th century referred to that formation "as in the Spanish dance" in contrast to the English pattern. I hypothesize that Spain and Sicily may have seemed similar to some English dancing masters. Today we call the "Sicilian" formation or as it had been earlier dubbed the "Spanish" formation by the modern designation of "improper." = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Alan Winston: I looked into this a while back; the stuff from the 1820s is my possibly messed up version of stuff Susan de Guardiola told me about. Executive summary: - There's nothing Sicilian about it. - There's nothing Circassian about it. The "Spanish Dance" formation (duple improper) seems to indeed have come from Spain but been adopted by English-speaking dancing masters. Dancing master G.M.S. Chivers turned that longways into a circle of couples-facing-couples in the 1820s and called it a "Chiversian" circle. [Much detail omitted here about weird variations.] That name wasn't particularly popular. I honestly don't know whether "Sicilian" and "Circassian" are misprisions of "Chiversian", but I haven't seen anything from, eg, 1840 using any of those words. So things go along from the 1820s to the 1870s and dances in that formation (including a specific dance sequence called the Spanish Waltz, rather than the genre of English dances of that name, which may have been longways dances anyway). The English dancing masters of this period liked to assign an exotic foreign origin to the stuff they were teaching, when they weren't proudly proclaiming themselves the inventors of it. In the 1860s, a specific dance in that formation called "Sicilienne Circle" was published, with the dancing master claiming that it was formerly popular but had fallen out of favor because of bad behavior from dancers. (That was in Hillgrove, 1865; he was an Englishman but published in the USA, so I don't know whether he's saying it was popular in England or in the USA.) I can't draw a clear line from that to the formation being called "Sicilian Circle", and I have no evidence about how popular "Le Sicilienne" was, but at some point after that - and it might be some time in the mid-20th century, for all I know - that was the established name for the formation. Hope that helps! Full Posting at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/trad-dance-callers/message/3039 What Elias Howe has to say in 1859: SICILIAN CIRCLE (form as for Spanish dance) 100 steps All balance, swing four hands-ladies chain-balance to partners and turn-right and left-all forward and back, forward and cross to face the next couple. So note that this is Howe calling a specific dance "Sicilian Circle" and identifying it as "form as for Spanish dance"; to Howe, "Sicilian Circle" isn't a genre. = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = English Ceilidh Discussion Group: http://www.cix.co.uk/~net-services/ec/#bp Callers' Discussion List http://www.sharedweight.net/mailman/listinfo/callers Traditional Dance Callers List http://groups.yahoo.com/group/trad-dance-callers ECD mailing list http://www.bacds.org/mailman/listinfo/ecd = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Happy dancing, John John Sweeney, Dancer, England john(a)modernjive.com 01233 625 362 & 07802 940 574 http://www.contrafusion.co.uk <http://www.contrafusion.co.uk/> for Dancing in Kent