[SCA-Dance] Goddisses (via Lovelace)

Gwommy 'Bill' Holderman gwommy at gmail.com
Thu Jul 7 12:07:36 EDT 2011


It makes sense to me. This is how I started teaching the 3rd chorus to
Parson's Farewell. Depending on the speed of the music, you may not
have time to do all that Playford says. In which case, I tell people
to follow the pattern for 16 counts and then stop and reverse it for
the other 16 counts and you'll end up back in place (assuming you go
back at the same speed).
--Gwommy

>Quote from Dafydd:
==================================
The solution is even better for the hey, though I must admit that it
is not my own interpretation but a brainstorm of
Maestra Sara de Bonneville when, at KWDS8, we had reached a bit of an
impasse on this point.  Lovelace's version of
the dance is for "at least 10" people, which means that 5 couples
isn't a maximum but a minimum.  How, then, do you
do a hey for five or more people in 16 counts?

The clue is in the instruction:  "do the hey backwards and forwards".
Take this instruction, pair it with the pattern of
the rest of the dance (going halfway around the other gender's line,
circling first one way, and then the other), and
the result is startlingly obvious:  rather than trying to complete any
form of hey in 16 counts, you weave in one direction
(for the first man, that's down the set, or backwards) for 8 counts,
about face regardless of where you have ended up,
and weave for 8 counts back to your place.  Simple, right?

As a further aid to this maneuver (which isn't quite as simple to do
as it is to say/describe), each exchange, be it in
two counts or four counts, should be complete - in other words, you
are all the way around the person you are
exchanging with even if you have to scurry to do so - so that when
reversing course, there is minimal confusion as
to who you are changing with next and where the line really is.  This
isn't in the instructions or even absolutely
necessary if your dancers seem to be able to make do without it, but
if you decide to try this and run into trouble,
maybe this aid will help.
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