--- Rickey wrote:
As I recall the dances Petronella and Green Mountain Petronella differ in the
order of the balances and the turns: Petronella: "Around to your right
and you balance", while Green Mountain Petronella is "first you balance then
you
turn". If this is so then how can the tunes for these dances be played together
as I have seen suggested.
--- end of quote ---
Well, you don't have to change the dance with the tune change, but it's fun to
do so if your dancers are up for it. You can alert them that they'll be doing
the balance/turn in different order and the givem them a heads-up and call once
or twice as the tune changes. When we do that, we usually go from Petronella
into GMP.
The association of these tunes with the dances is a relatively recent
phenomenon. Ralph Page cites alternate tunes as ones commonly played in the past
for the dance.
And remember, too, that the dance as it used to be done, until the early 1970s,
was with just the active couple doing the balance and turn, a show-off moment
when everyone would strut their stuff and demonstrate their highly
individualistic balance steps. Still fun to do it that way. If your dancers are
flexible enough to try that, you can encourage folks to try out different styles
of balance steps. You'll find an interesting article titled "50 Variations of
the Balance" in Northern Junket, Vol. 5, #1, pp. 13-19, located online starting
at this URL:
http://www.izaak.unh.edu/dlp/NorthernJunket/pages/NJv05/NJv05-01/NJv.05.01.…
tm
David Millstone