Re: Triple Minor Progression

I honestly don't know what they did when they got to the bottom of the line. Susan de Guardiola has read much more extensively than I have and may have encountered some discussion of this. One interesting thing in some dance sources is "neutral couples". (I read a piece by Thomas Hardy which I can't find now where he describes "College Hornpipe" in considerable detail, and this finally got me to understand how it works. Mr. Wilson advocated them but I didn't understand his explanation.) Essentially, take hands eight for a triple minor. You have 1,2,3, and neutral. Run the dance once. The neutrals are now threes. On the second round, after a progression, the old 2s are neutral (or out at the top), the old 3s are 2s, the old neutrals are 3s. At the beginning of the third round, the couple out at the top comes in (yup, after being out only once). If I were actually trying to get a crowd to do this, I think I would just have the 1s who only have 1 more couple just step down, the way they do it in RSCDS Scottish. I can't give a strong justification for this, but remember (in Georgian England, anyway, and likely in Colonial America in landholding circles) that standing up together at dances was a major opportunity for unchaperoned conversation, so standing out more was a feature rather than a bug, and also that the 1s might have just danced down a line of 30 couples and could probably tolerate not dancing one round. If you were doing the neutral couple thing , if you danced one round with ghosts then you might be back in as threes immediately, without any time out at all. Even without neutral couples, it's likely more sociable to just step down and have a brief chat with the other couple. -- Alan On 11/29/15 11:06 AM, Tom Willson tjwill3(a)sbcglobal.net [trad-dance-callers] wrote: