26 Jun
2015
26 Jun
'15
10:18 p.m.
Rich Sbardella wrote (responding to a message from Read Weaver):
Read,
I did not understand your reference to grapevining in MWSD. Can you elaborate?
Rich
Read replied:
Are you asking about grapevine step? A twisting step,
where you alternate the right foot going in front of and behind the left as you walk
sideways. It’s how circles (of 4 or 8) are done in modern western square dancing, and in
the last several years increasingly seen, to the dismay of all right-thinking people, on
contra dance floors
and Amy Wimmer wrote:
Interesting. I've never seen the grapevine step
done in square dancing, but ...
Using the grapevine step for circles is *extremely* common in MWSD,
to the point where I presume some MWSDers consider it de rigueur.
I just now typed
singing square dance
into the youtube.com search box. (I included "singing" because
MWSD singing squares often have a circle as the first move of the
opening chorus.) Out of the first ten hits, five are of videos
of MWSD:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laRjhbX3GBs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxwpR8iKmUs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBe_fBmURcI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoOz1OFK0XE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7fAyxudyuM
The first four of these begin with circling. In the fifth, the
dancers only circle briefly around 2:58 and 4:32. In all cases
you can see some (and in some cases all or nearly all) of the
dancers using grapevine steps. Often men and women will dance
two beats out of sync (M crossing R foot behind L while W cross
R in front of L, and vice versa) so that dancers alternately
turn to face partners and corners.
Like Read, I dislike seeing grapevine steps for circles in
contras, or in traditional squares for that matter.
At the Northwest Folklife Festival last month, one of the
dances had an unusual and tightly-timed sequence that included
a circle. The guy who was progressing ahead of me along the
set did the circles with a grapevine step (or something similar)
and made almost every new neighbor reach me several beats late,
so that we sometimes skipped a figure to catch up to the music.
It was the very sort of situation for which Tod Whittemore
invented the term "rock in the stream" (discussed on this list
on 14-Aug-2014 under the Subject line "Is there a name for this
role?").
On a different occasion a couple years ago, I was at an
old-time square dance doing a visiting couple dance. An
approaching couple were long-time dancers with whom I might
expect to do the sort of beautiful circle that stays round by
virtue of its motion. (Think about how the loop of rope in
this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGnCBcZzmRI
stays round without the aid of spray starch). Alas it was
not to be. My partner was all a-bippin' an' a-boppin' and
hip-wigglin' an' grape-vinin' and had no idea what she was
missing.
--Jim