25 Oct
2015
25 Oct
'15
1:32 a.m.
See the link below for more information on the dance The Spanish Gypsy (or
Jeepsie), the song from which the tune for the dance came, and the 1623
play from which the song came, which had the title "The Spanish Gypsy".
http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/lod/vol4/spanish_gipsy.html
I'll go out on a limb and make some historical pronouncements which cannot
be proven, but which seem most probable to me:
The dance title The Spanish Gypsy came from the dance being done to a tune
associated with the play The Spanish Gypsy.
The dance figure Gypsy got its name from the prevalence of the figure in
the dance The Spanish Gypsy.
The Morris dance figures whole-gyp and half-gyp were originally called
whole-gypsy and half-gypsy. (Although parts of England had and ancient
tradition of seasonal dancing under the name Morris Dance, it seems likely,
from the nature of the dances, that the form of the Cotswold dance
traditions collected by Cecil Sharp only went back to the Elizabethan
period.)
I offer the above hypotheses to counter the claim that the dance term
"gypsy" was based on an ethnic stereotype. Of course, even if I'm right
about these hypotheses, they have nothing to do with the fact that the term
"gypsy" offends some people, which we want to avoid.
Jacob
On Sat, Oct 24, 2015 at 5:47 PM, James Saxe via Callers <
callers(a)lists.sharedweight.net> wrote:
Let me point out that the 1651 edition of Playford also
includes a dance titled "The Spanish Jeepsie" (listed as
"Spanish Jepsies" in the contents). This dance has a similar
figure to the one in "Cuckolds all a row":
... go all about your We. not turning your faces. ...
In fact the second and third parts of "The Spanish Jeepsie"
have
... go about your own as before ...
So the figure occurs more often in that dance than it does in
"Cuckolds all a row".
I don't know of (and haven't looked for) any specific evidence
linking "The Spanish Jeepsie" to the terms "half-gip" and
"whole-gip" in Morris dancing. I also don't know of (and
haven't looked for) any evidence linking the choreography of
"The Spanish Jeepsie" to anything that occurs in traditional
Romani dancing (or it traditional Spanish dancing).