[SCA-Dance] Documenting Argeers for an A&S competition

[Dani Zweig]

I agree that there's no way to tell from the complexity.  (The notion that
things get more complex and more sophisticated over time is a
nineteenth-century intellectual inheritance.)  The people who danced the
new country dances in Queen Elizabeth's court would have known contemporary
Italian and Spanish dances, so the bar on how high complexity could have
been early on is very high.

- Dani

On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 10:13 AM, White, John <white at drexel.edu> wrote:

> >From:  Dani Zweig [dani at pobox.com]
>
> >> However, there isn't really any way to tell from that complexity just
> how
> >>long
> >> people had been doing ECD, nor when it was a fresh, new style.
> >
> >We know quite a bit about that.  People were certainly doing what they
> >called country dances in the sixteenth century.  But I would advise
> against
> >going down this road with documentation.  This is the "people ate chicken
> >in period" approach to document Kentucky Fried Chicken.
> >
> >The challenge in this case is to document Argeers to period, not to
> >document ECD to period.
> >
> >- Dani
>
> Without being pedantic, my statement wasn't whether or not ECD is period,
> nor
> whether there was country dance pre-1600.  The statement was that we cannot
> judge from the *complexity* present in 1650 how long people had been doing
> the
> style of dance called 'country dance' *in* 1650, nor when it was a new
> style.
>
> We have popular song/dance titles that are similar or the same in the 16th
> and 17th
> centuries.  We have song tunes used in the mid-17th century that were
> created
> in the late 16th.  For example, Lightly Love/Light o' Love is from the
> late 1590s
> (in Shakespeare) and the dance tune Light o' Love is from even earlier:
> these match a dance choreography written down in or before 1649 (in
> Lovelace) - none of that makes the two the same dance; neither can it be
> proven
> that they are not (though some analyzing of the context of Shakespeare's
> usage might preclude the kidnapping-style Lovelace country dance being what
> the Bard was referring to).
>
> It is, all in all, a tough nut to crack.
>
>        \\Dafydd Cyhoeddwr
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