[Callers] Advice about "gypsy"

[Alan Winston via Callers]

On 10/24/15 10:32 PM, Jacob Nancy Bloom via Callers wrote:
> 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 
> <http://www.pbm.com/%7Elindahl/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.
>
Sure, extremely plausible.

> The dance figure Gypsy got its name from the prevalence of the figure 
> in the dance The Spanish Gypsy.

If true, only true in the modern revival.  (Basically, Cecil Sharp made 
up *and named* the Gypsy figure.  In Spanish Jeepsie - reconstructed at 
the link you have above- the figure isn't a gypsy, and it isn't called a 
gypsy.  It's a back to back.)

Point me toward dance notation published before 1900  that uses the term 
"gypsy" as the name of a figure, and then we can talk.  Until there's 
some evidence that Elizabethan dancers used the figure name, your 
argument dies here.

> 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 think you're saying that Cotswold dances as collected by Sharp and 
others reflected Elizabethan country dances as shown in Playford, and 
that whole-gyp and half-gyp were therefore originally named after the 
(notional) country dance figure and were thus properly named whole-gypsy 
and half-gypsy.  Please correct me if I've misunderstood this.

This is irrelevant unless you can show that Elizabethan country dance 
actually had a figure called gypsy, which you haven't.  (And it's 
actually irrelevant even if you can, since once you draw a line from the 
play to the tune to the dance you've said what you can about it not 
being an ethnic stereotype.)

But if it *were* relevant, I'd ask you to explain why these 
Playford-following Elizabethan morris dancers used "half-gypsy" for what 
Playford called "sides all".

-- Alan
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