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

[Charlene Charette]

Millar *is* an unreliable source and I'm not sure how what I wrote would 
give the impression otherwise.  He did lots of odds things to dances.  I 
was merely pointing out that the version of Half Hannikin commonly done 
is the SCA is not an SCA invention.  Few people know that it doesn't 
match the original in Playford and fewer still know where the version we 
do originates.

I like to know the origins of the stuff we do -- both the original 
source and the source of the reconstruction.  Therefore, I've read 
plenty of bad and/or unreliable sources.  These books tend to the be the 
origins for a lot of SCA practices and can be interesting reads.

--Perronnelle


Mary Railing wrote:
> 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
>>>>
>>> ________________________________________________________________
>>> To send mail to the entire list, be sure sca-dance at sca-dance.org is listed
>>> in the To line of any response.
>>>
>>> To Unsubscribe send mail to: sca-dance-request at sca-dance.org
>>> ________________________________________________________________
>>>
>>
> 
> 

-- 
No number of experiments can prove me right, but it takes only one to 
prove me wrong.  -- Albert Einstein