Rich — What do you need these for? Class residency? Birthday party? How old are the kids? Do they want to be there? How long do you have with them? How important is it that the dances be historically accurate, and now hat dimensions? The “Colonial Social Dancing for Children” book is aimed at classroom teachers and is constructed assuming that you have the kids multiple times, and has some emphasis on footwork and etiquette. (Period footwork resembles modern Scottish footwork.) The Heritage Dances of Early America book isn’t aimed at children and doesn’t help very much with how things phrase to the tunes. The Cracking Chestnuts book is really looking at old-favorite contra dances; jn the 1820s and 1830s the contra dances mostly didn’t look like contra dances as we do them today. (Footwork, ball of the foot vs. flat feet, no ballroom swinging, handshake stars not wrist-grip stars,e tc.) Country dances in America and England aren’t very different at this point. (Kate van Winkle Keller, with various collaborators, has reconstructed and published dance collections from American sources 1770s-1790s. Even the “New Country Dances From Topsham Maine” book is mostly dances published in Englsh sources.). Quadrilles have come in. Cotillions haven’t gone yet. The Spanish Dance formation seems to come in (in England) in the late 1820s; that's more or less Sicilian Circle, and can be fairly accessible. I've had good luck with easy cotillions (Marlbrouk, George Washington's Favorite) for kids over 10. For this period you might also want reels for three, four, and six. Lancers Quadrille comes in (published c. 1815).

On Mar 17, 2014, at 8:11 PM, rich sbardella <richsbardella(a)snet.net> wrote: