[SCA-Dance] looking for a few good dances to start our group

[Mary Railing]

Really?  I'd been warned that Millar was an unreliable source, but I've 
never read his book, so I didn't know that he was responsible for this 
one.

--Urraca


On Thu, 15 May 2008, Charlene Charette wrote:

> And even fewer people in the SCA seem aware that the round mixer version 
> is NOT an SCA invention.  It was created by John Fitzhugh Millar and 
> published in his book "Elizabethan Country Dances" in 1985.
> 
> --Perronnelle
> 
> Mary Railing wrote:
> > Many people in the SCA seem unaware of this, but the mixer version of Half 
> > Hannikin is an SCA invention.  The actual dance is quite different.  This 
> > is not the result of ambiguous instructions in Playford.  Someone made a 
> > deliberate decision to create a stripped down dance.  As a teaching dance 
> > this works, but so would many more authentic dances.
> > 
> > --Urraca
> > 
> > On Wed, 14 May 2008 tmcd at panix.com wrote:
> > 
> >> On Sun, 11 May 2008, Alex Clark <alexbclark at pennswoods.net> wrote:
> >>> At 04:09 PM 5/8/2008 -0500, Tim McDaniel wrote:
> >>>>> & are there any others that are simple for beginners?
> >>>> I've always been fond of Half Hannigan for a warmup.
> >>>> - it's vigorous without being exhausting (if your music isn't too
> >>>>    long)
> >>>> - it's the prototypical English Country Dance, consisting of nothing
> >>>>    BUT doubling, siding, and arming
> >>> On the contrary, this does not make it a prototype. It is more like
> >>> an eviscerated ECD.
> >> There's no more evidence that it was designed by cutting down a dance
> >> than there is that it was built minimally.  It does practice the basic
> >> steps (other than set and turn single).
> >>
> >>>> - it's a mixer, so it's good for "how do you do?" or a brief "hi,
> >>>>    Jane, long time no see!"
> >>> I advise against teaching this modern dance to beginners.
> >> I see that the Terpsichore booklet is misleading when it states the
> >> usual SCA version is "Playford 1651" when the source at
> >> <http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~flip/contrib/dance/playford.html#Playford_43>
> >> or <http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/playford_1651/050small.html>
> >> shows it as Longways for as many as will.
> >>
> >> I'm not at all good at interpreting Playford: is there a good
> >> reconstruction that my brief Googling didn't show?
> >> <http://members.ozemail.com.au/~grayn1/DDances.html#Halfe Hanikin>
> >> looks basically plausible to me: you have to get #1 man and #N woman
> >> "offside" and then get them back in dancing with the same sex as
> >> Playford specifies.  But it doesn't state exactly how #1 man and #N
> >> woman get offside and the rest progress, and then get back in, and the
> >> ways coming to my mind right now feel awkward to me.
> >>
> >> Just to make sure: does the music in the facimile match the music as
> >> I believe it's usually played in the SCA?
> >>
> >> Dannet Lincoln
> >>
> > 
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