[SCA-Dance] SCA Created Dances

Jane & Mark Waks waks at comcast.net
Fri Apr 23 09:32:32 EDT 2010


Tim McDaniel wrote:
> Aren't there ECDs that end up with people out of their original
> positions (excluding progressives for as many repetitions as will)?

Possibly, but it certainly seems to be unusual -- all of the squares I 
can think of offhand land you back in place at the end, and my 
theoretical rewrite of Fickle Ladies is as a square.

For those not familiar with it, BTW, the central notion of Fickle Ladies 
is that (over and over and over again) the ladies do something, then the 
men try to imitate it but the ladies wind up switching partners on them. 
That central conceit may be a tad questionable from a period POV, but 
the dance follows rather nicely from there, and some bits are directly 
taken from ECD.

The only problem is that it switches *so* fast and *so* frequently 
(especially during the chorus) that it is very easy to get confused, and 
if any one person makes a significant mistake, it tends to ripple 
outward until the set self-destructs: it's relatively difficult to 
recover. (It's the only dance I know for N couples where, no matter how 
large N is, a single person can cause the whole set to collapse.)

Hence my desire to take the core idea, reduce it to "one weirdness", and 
transmute it slightly into a more predictable square for four couples, 
so that people are less likely to get confused. The dance is enough fun 
that it deserves to get spruced up a bit and spread around more, IMO...

				-- Justin


More information about the Sca-dance mailing list