[SCA-Dance] Halfe Hannikin

[Alex Clark]

At 11:01 AM 5/23/2008 -0500, Tim McDaniel wrote:
>. . .
>On Fri, 23 May 2008, Alex Clark <alexbclark at pennswoods.net> wrote:
> > I'm afraid that on this point neither of us has been successfully
> > explaining things. My reconstruction has a progression that is not
> > really separate from the turn; it is an outcome of the turn. The
> > dancers turn each other clockwise (to the left hand as they hold
> > both hands), and as they come out on a tangent from that turn they
> > overshoot their places so that each one ends up with the next.
> >
> > In practice, this turn followed by a change along the line feels
> > almost like turning and coming back to the starting place, and is
> > timed practically the same way. The biggest difference in executing
> > it is that in order to go along the line one lets go of hands for a
> > moment, and then takes hands with the next.
>
>Did you try turning counter-clockwise?  If so, does one flow better
>than the other, or is there a reason to prefer one over the other?

I didn't try it, I just thought it through and concluded that I didn't like 
it. I feel that a clockwise turn is more likely on principle, and in this 
dance it turns out to feed naturally and easily into the change along the 
line, with each person finding the next one face to face. A 
counterclockwise turn would require each person to come around the other 
way out of the turn, going by the person they're about to dance with, 
almost back to back, and then turning around to find them.

BTW, to some extent I already knew how it was going to work, from doing 
contra dances in Beckett formation, though in those dances it's a longer 
distance to progress with a partner.

-- 
Alex Clark/Henry of Maldon