25 Jul
2008
25 Jul
'08
6:57 p.m.
Jack wrote:
Do you know of any figures or dances that had their
roots in English
County, showed up in the Civil War period and are still extant in
some form in modern contra dancing?
Trenchmore (Playford 1653): http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/dance/Trenchmore.html
is a fairly clear antecedent to Roger de Coverly.
Roger de Coverly is pretty much the same damn thing as the Virginia Reel, which
is likely the best-known Civil War dance. (Some people do VR where all the
action is with your partner rather than on the corners.)
Virginia Reel is still a very useful one-night-stand dance, and I know a caller
who uses it as the first or second step in an intro to contra program.
Z My mom is involved with a living
history farm in SC and they will be doing a program
that will involve
all three types of dancing. They would like to be able to trace a
figure or dance through all three periods, and possibly look at how
the figure has changed over the years. If so, do you know details of
how they had changed over the years?
So it depends on what you mean by modern contra. 21st century?
Since I was just arguing about squares on another list, you might do better
doing
- Newcastle (or other square formation ECD)
- Lancer's Quadrille (selected figures, or depending how researchy you want
to be a precisely-selected-for-CW-era set of tunes)
- A modern square dance
Or, more scholarly:
Some 1700s ECD with four changes of rights and lefts (which is like a, heaven
help us, mini-grand right and left; pull by right, pull by left, pull by right,
pull by left), a quadrille figure where the first four do rights and lefts
(pull by right, finish left hand turn facing into the set by having someone
flip to face in), a contra with right-and-left-through (eg, pass or pull by
right, courtesy turn to face back in).
Is this the kind of thing you're looking for?
[That said, I think this may be kind of an ill-advised idea. Is this farm
really trying to do a scholarly, nominally authentic, dance history
presentation without a dance history scholar on staff or guesting? If the
group does an ECD in modern style, a quadrille in late Victorian (walking), and
a modern contra, not only will the contrast be diminished (so that the audience
can't tell how what they're looking at has changed) but they'll be giving
people the wrong idea of what dance of those periods was like. (And note that
there is no single historic ECD style - we don't know footwork 1650-1690 (when
"French steps" come in) - and the style from late 1700s is different - more
like modern Scottish - than early 1700s (more Baroque).)
-- Alan
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Alan Winston --- WINSTON(a)SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU
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