[SCA-Dance] Improper ECDs?

[Kirsten Garner]

Good morning all,

It occasionally takes me quite a while to get around
to things, but last night I managed to have a look at
something a friend pointed out to me about my
reconstruction of Faine I would (about three years
ago...). He said I'd done it backwards, and this
concerned me. So, I went to have a good look. Now, I
couldn't find the problem in the text of my
reconstruction, but I noticed that I'd set the square
up labelled 1-4 *counter-clockwise*. Now, obviously it
isn't that way in Playford, so I started wondering why
I'd done that. Answer: the original is set improper. 

Now this got me curious - the dance is set improper,
and obviously must be so or the text choreography does
not work. So, I started looking through the rest of
the book, and I found that all of the following dances
start improper: Night Peece, Daphne, Faine I would,
Hearts Ease, Argeers, St Martins, Cuckolds all a row
and Glory of the west. Many of these are dances we do
a lot in the SCA and so don't really question. Are we
just assuming this is a typo in the diagram? It
doesn't much affect most of these dances, but it
completely messes up Faine if you try to set it
proper. 

Should we revamp our teaching of these dances?
Thoughts?

Julian