>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C.
>> Elizabeth Peterson:
Good afternoon everyone.
If I could ask you to take a seat.
My name is Betsy Peterson.
I'm the Director of the American
Folklife Center here at the Library
of Congress and on behalf of the
staff, I want to welcome you today
for what is the latest presentation
of our Botkin Lecture Series
and I should say this is the
first presentation of 2016
and it's a very special
presentation.
The Botkin Series for the
American Folklife Center allows us
to do a few things.
Most importantly, it allows
us to present the latest
and best scholarship in folklore,
ethnomusicology, oral history,
and cultural heritage
studies of all kinds.
But also is an important strategy
for us regarding acquisitions.
These lectures are
tape-recorded and will become part
of our permanent collections at the
library, so if you want to come back
and listen to it you can, but it
also will eventually be prepared
for webcast so that it can be shared
with Internet patrons
throughout the world
who obviously cannot make it here.
So with that said or that caveat,
if you have a cell phone turned
on please take a moment
to turn it off.
And now to the special part, this
is a special lecture today for us
because it allows us to
celebrate one of our partners
and collaborators, The
Country Dance and Song Society
who are celebrating their
centennial this year.
Our correspondence files at the
American Folklife Center are full
of letters dating back to 1974
between the two organizations
and over the years, has
donated books to our collections
and we've collected a
full run of the magazine
"Country Dance and Song."
We helped plan the move of CDSS's
library from a private home
to the University of New Hampshire
and CDSS awarded AFC a grant
a few years ago to help
in the digitization of our James
Madison Carpenter collection
which was terrific and
we're so thankful and CDSS
and AFC have collaborated on several
successful lecture and dance events
over the years celebrating
the acquisitions
of the Anthony Grant
Barrand Collection.
So continuing in this
long tradition,
when I first came here a few
years ago, I was pleased to meet
with CDSS's Executive Director Rima
Dael here at the Library of Congress
about how the American Folklife
Center could be involved
and could support the
centennial celebration of CDSS
and to plan today's lecture
and dance demonstration.
So let's just take a moment
to give a round of applause
to Country Dance and Song Society.
[ Applause ]
And here's to another 100 years,
though we probably won't be
there then, but anyway now,
allow me to introduce today's
speaker Dr. Graham Christian.
Graham Christian is a dance
historian, English dance leader,
choreographer, director and
musician for Amherst, Massachusetts.
He holds a doctorate in 17th
century English literature
from the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst
and he is also a librarian who
holds a master's degree in library
and information science from
Simmons College; a Renaissance man.
In addition to having authored
"The Playford Assembly," which were
for sale out there today and
I think have sold out in fact,
he writes the Dance History
column, "Tell Me More,"
for the CDSS newsletter
and appears as caller
for English country dances all over
the U.S. and is a frequent presenter
at academic conferences
lecturing and talking
about the history of social dance.
And I also want to welcome and
thank him, because he donated a copy
of "The Playford Assembly"
to our collections today
so we're very appreciative of that.
But with so with all of that
said now, please join me
in welcoming today's Botkin
lecturer, Dr. Graham Christian.
[ Applause ]
>> Graham Christian: Well thank
you for those kind remarks
and I also want to thank Nancy
Gross, Jennifer Cutting, Thea Austen
and my editor at Country
Dance Song Society,
Pat McPherson for making this
possible and I'm thrilled to see all
of you here on a wintery
Saturday afternoon.
So thank you for making time for us.
It's a real honor for the
Country Dance and Song Society
to present a lecture as part
of the Benjamin Botkin series.
Benjamin Botkin's work among
other things was concerned
with addressing the ways in which
folklore can be a force for a change
in people's lives and
that it is a living thing
and that forges a deep connection
to the work of Cecil Sharp
and I'll have occasion to refer to
some degree to Cecil Sharp's work
as a dance historian
re-constructor and champion
in the course of my remarks.
So I'm going to speak
fairly informally today,
so let me give you a sense of the
overall structure of the next hour
and change, which is that I
will speak for a little while
about the nature of this kind of
dance that we do and its history.
I'll speak a little bit about
the creation of the book
and what we hope its
significance will be
and then I will invite
my captive dancers,
my performers who are seated along
the front row here to come up
and join me and we will show you
some very wonderful characteristic
dances included in the collection,
but then also say something
about the form of English
country dance its story
and then I hope we will have
time for a few questions
if any have arisen from the course
of our dance or from my lecture.
So, I am very nearsighted.
So I'm fairly confident
that there are many friends
out in the audience, but I
wouldn't really know that,
so I'm going to make the working
assumption that some number
of you are only slightly acquainted
with English country
dance as a form.
So I'll say a few words
about that before I continue
with my other remarks.
So the English country
dance, what is it?
Let me start by saying
what it is not.
Typical questions that English
country dancers and leaders get.
So, do you dance in fancy costumes?
No, not so much.
You could, you could turn up at a
ball or an event dressed for 1780
or 1650 that would be fine
and people would make remarks
about your apparel, but we are
not really historical dancers
in that sense.
We are not reenactors of a
specific historical moment.
We are not reenactors.
We are not re-constructors
in that sense.
We are not reliving the moment
of the English Civil War
or the American Civil War or Regency
England in Jane Austen's day.
We are not reenactors
in that sense at all.
We are very interested in the
kind of work that those dancers
and their scholars do because they
are invested in the history of dance
as we are and we trade tips and
comments and some people dance
in both communities, but ours
is a different tradition,
it's a living tradition
rather than a reconstruction.
Are you members of The Society
of Creative Anachronism?
No, no we're not.
Although, a great deal
of very dedicated,
very interesting scholarship
has come out of the Society
for Creative Anachronism.
Are you familiar with the
study for Creative Anachronism
to some degree -- enough?
Some very interesting material has
come out of the SCA, as well as,
some interesting new
dances in the style
of the early Playford generation
dances, but we don't do that.
Is it that thing where you dance all
in a line in boots and cowboy hats?
No. That's line dancing.
It is associated with country
life, but not the same country.
[ Laughter ]
So are you square dancers?
Not quite.
And then as a historian I have
to pause and say, square dancing
as done in this country,
all its forms,
is really a fairly direct lineal
descendant of English country dance
to what I will sometimes say
is, "No, what we do is more
like the grandmother
of square dance."
And then if their eyes have
not glazed over yet I will go
into somewhat more detail about
the likely train of descendants.
Are you countra dancers?
Well, many of us are countra
dancers and what I will then say is,
"What we do is more
like the direct ancestor
of American countra dancing,
American social dancing."
And one of the last dances that
we will perform altogether,
The Young Widow, is such
a direct connection.
So one of the things that
you will be reminded of is
that English country dance comes
to this country, no surprise,
with the English colonists
and is very rapidly adopted
and then adapted and changed
already by 1791 collections
of what I would class really
as English country dances
are called "contra dances."
They don't have the recognizable
swings and stomps and sweating
of contemporary contra dance.
We are not averse to a
good healthful sweat,
but it is a little different.
So we are not any of those things.
So English country dance, so
real history; how old is it?
Anyone's guess.
There are tantalizing indications
in the written record that go back
as far as 1530 and these records
had to do with designating names
that are later associated with
known English country dance tract,
things like "Trenchmore" and "The
Shaking of the Sheets" and so on.
Even better, there are numerous
early written references to a "Hey"
or a "Hey Dugee" which it seems more
and more as we understand the form
and its history better and better
is really probably the core
or the central form of English
country dance; the weaving figure
which you will see a couple of
manifestations for 3 dancers
in probably its ur form and
then later sometimes for 4,
sometimes for 6, occasionally
for 8 and so forth.
So there are those references
that go back as far as 1530,
but in the absence of a rather
detailed written choreographic track
for any of these dances,
a shrewd historian has
to attach doubt to all of it.
A shrewd historian has to say, could
be the same but we'll never know.
We'll never know until
we recover a manuscript
in which someone describes dance in
the way that the first manuscripts
and the first printed collection
of dances give evidence to.
So that first printed collection,
the famous 1651 collection,
it was called the "English
Dancing Master."
Later editions dropped
English, I think assuming
that everyone would take
English for granted.
And it was printed in 1651 for a
young publisher named John Playford.
In 1651, England was
under the protection
of the commonwealth
under Oliver Cromwell.
King Charles I had
lost his head in 1649;
John Playford was a
fairly unashamed royalist.
He started his publishing career
among other things publishing
somewhat provocative
pro-royalist tracts.
This was as soon as he earned
his independence as a publisher
and this rapidly got him in trouble,
in fact, it got him some jail time
and when he emerged from
pokey he decided to retreat
to the safer fields of dance
and music and this was one
of his first publications.
It was a music collection that
he published around the same time
in collaboration with
his former master.
So this had 105 dances
and this was a first,
there were so many novelties
with this collection.
A bird's-eye overview of the
way that the dancers would look
in their opening formation.
A description of simple
step sequences,
mostly singles and doubles.
A description of the format
and its typical shapes
and a verbal description
of the figures.
So where did this collection
come from?
We can be sure of several things.
First, that it was not the
creation of John Playford.
We're grateful to him forever,
but he was primarily a publisher
and he had a shrewd
eye for a good deal.
He may, may had played
some part as an editor
in the early dance collections,
but was unlikely to have written
or created any of the dances.
He was a collector and publisher.
And so this collection not written
by him, is likely to be the fruit
of a long period of gestation.
Some of the dances likely go back
to the turn of the 17th century,
some again, temptingly could go back
to the first quarter
of the 16th century.
So, this was the fruit
of a kind of tradition;
why publish such a volume is 1651?
First, public assemblies
were widely discouraged
by the puritan commonwealth
and this was great opportunity
for private individuals to gather
in their homes and do something;
you could gamble, you could
drink or you could dance
and this was a good option.
And many of the dances in the early
collections reflect this reality,
dances for small numbers.
And we will have a total of
10 dancers a little later
in the afternoon that you'll see.
And in the early decades of
English country dance post 1651
that would have been a very typical
number, a very small set of longways
and I'll talk later about
the considerable expansion
of its popularity, but early on
that would have been very typical.
So this form experiences a wide
and immediate success, so wide
and so immediate that it does lead
one to suppose that some forms
of these dances had been done
and danced not only in England
but in other places
even before 1651.
By 1653, etched as just one for
instance, Bulstrode Whitelock's
who was Oliver Cromwell's ambassador
to the court of Queen Christina
of Sweden records having endured
many bizarre conversations
with Queen Christina,
but among other things,
that they did a whole set
of English country dances
and Bulstrode was expected to be
proficient in them and to know them,
but they already knew
them at the Swedish court.
They just wanted him to
show them his best stuff;
1653 so that's either he
had a copy or he knew them
and the Swedes knew them.
So that's impressive.
The English Court in exile, the
young Charles II and his mother
and all of their attendants
fled most of them to France,
some of them to Holland and
Belgium and they took the dance
with them we are pretty sure.
So the French Court started to
know these dances in the 1650s.
In the early 1680s, King Louis
sent one his dancing masters,
Andre Lorin, over to England
to explore this curious,
interesting new format.
And Andre Lorin notated a number
of dances, brought them back
and wrote them down in an
early visual notation system
and I may have cause to
refer to that shortly.
So what was novel about this dance?
Why does it take off as it does?
And it will expand
considerably as you'll see.
What's novel about this dance?
Well, social dancing
has been us forever.
I've always thought you
could just swing a stick
at a rock somebody will
hop up and down to it.
But this is novel because the
large group social dancing
up to this point in Europe
had largely consisted of sort
of like a conga line
but hand-in-hand rather
than waist-to-waist, so going
around and around in a room
with a step sequence; I'm
being a little dismissive
because there's some
really interesting forms,
but a lot of circles and
lines and a lively movement,
you can see some evidence of
that in Brueghel's paintings,
he has a famous painting
of "The Kermis Fair."
And you can see the kind of activity
there, often it's seen as heartiness
and such rural customs, or there
were some solo steps you could do,
the galliard.
There were some couple dances
that you could do like the volta,
but this format, this
English country dance format,
was quite distinctive
because in the line dance
or the circle dance you
catch on eventually,
you figure it out eventually.
Everybody draws you into the
movement and you catch on.
In solo dance or dance for two
people, it's either a performance
for you and your friends or your
courtiers or you can operate
in happy disregard every
other couple on the floor.
You and your partner could
be doing the volta like mad
and everybody else can be doing
the volta and you don't care.
This dance is distinctive
because it is so much cooperative.
It necessitates that everyone be
aware, awake and work together
to make the progressions function
properly and to allow everyone
to participate with a good will.
So that was quite distinctive.
It's unlikely that the English
alone devised the format.
There are precidents for the format
in Italian country dance
back into the 15th century.
Who can say who invents
a dance form?
Maybe the Italians came up
with it, maybe they didn't,
but my perception is that for
Italian dancing masters and dancers
who had a wide and vey
imaginative social dance repertoire.
This kind of longways
format with the progression,
and I'll talk about that in
a second, was but one arrow
in their quiver, they could
do so many other things.
Here is Chiaranzana and it does
this thing, on to the next.
But that the English seized
upon it with the will,
that they understood this as
somehow congenial to their sense
that there was precedence
and there was rank
and that were leading people
and following people,
but not too much so.
And as English political life and
English social life progressed,
it became I think a better
and better mirror of the way
that they saw the world, and I'll
talk more about that in a moment.
So the progression format, the other
distinctive feature in addition
to the longways, so in the
progression format you must work
with other people.
You have a partner as you
often would in a couple dance
and you move together in
cooperation with other couples up
and down what is called a
longways, and at the end
of a progressive figure you have
moved on and danced with a new set.
So that's really the
heart distinctive figure
of the Europeans get
fascinated with.
The English continued to dance
in a somewhat older format,
which we call the set dance,
for a relatively long time.
They, and the set dance
is a format you will see,
the set dance will be the first
dance that we will do altogether
and that set dance will evoke that
classic English country dance figure
of the "hey," and what
you will see in effect is
that the hey progresses people and
then returns them to their places.
So there's no final
progressive figure.
There were dances for
fixed numbers of people
where there was progression, so
that you would have a leading couple
and then the next couple would lead
and then the next couple would lead,
but this sort of ur format
of the set dance there is no
progression in that true sense.
And the English continued to use
that form at least through 1670
which was the 4th edition
of "The Dancing Master."
After 1670, the English in effect
stopped creating new dances
for fixed numbers of people.
It's all longways progressive
dances for another 120 or so years.
There is a footnote to make on
the realities of the set format,
which I will make in a moment.
So the French invest some time
and energy into understanding
and then notating the format.
Lorin's format was examined
carefully and then revised
and altered substantially by
two gentlemen named Beauchamp
and Feuillet and they
were interested
in discovering choreographing
a notation system
which would spare one -- once one
understood the complex symbol system
-- the necessity of words.
And for simpler English
country dances, contra dance,
it was fairly easy to
notate in this format.
The significance of this for English
country dance aficionados was
that it meant that now
the form could easily
and rapidly become international.
So once you had your collection,
once you had your [foreign word]
Nouveau Contra Dance of the year so
and so and so or 1712,
whatever it might be,
you could read off the page once you
understood the notation system no
matter your language.
So that then the form could spread
rapidly to Belgium, to Holland,
to Germany, to France, of
course, to Spain, to Italy so all
of those countries could rapidly
read off the notational format
and create their own
dances in the form.
And it's my perception that
these combined factors,
the appeal of the quasi or gradually
democratic nature of the form,
and it's accessibility through
this notational system assured its
international success
and between 1650
and let's say 1820-1825 something
like 30,000 English country
dances were published
which is an extraordinary
record and if you include some
of the related formats such
as the coterie, the cotillion
and alternate format dances
that are created in Spain,
in Italy and again in France.
The number is certainly that
high and probably higher
and in this country too as well,
so those early contra dances
are certainly within the family.
There were some considerable
changes in style and format
as the dance form went along.
Early on, it seemed like an obvious
descendent of a renaissance dance,
they wouldn't have
called it that at time,
but what we now term renaissance
dance with step sequences of singles
and doubles of rather processional
feeling to many of the dances,
but there's a fairly rapid change
particularly as the French catch
on to the form and an effort
to incorporate the latest
in fancy footwork from France --
and this underscores its success.
The French with their somewhat
more teared social system almost
instantly become uncomfortable
with the political implications
of longways and they immediately
reinvent it as early cotillon
or later it would called cotillions.
The early cotillon were dances for
two couples, again, non-progressive
so a fixed number and then for three
couples or three and three dancers
and then for four couples.
And that format the four couple
square dance cotillon gets
reintroduced in England
in the 1760s, 1767-1768
and that is an immediate success
and thereafter the cotillion shares
the stage with country dances
in England and elsewhere
really through around 1815
at which point another
thing happens which is
that the quadrille is devised.
The quadrille -- it is
not a true descendent
of the cotillion or cotillon.
The format of the cotillion was
this; it was in effect a step dance,
a dance for a fixed number and there
were unchanging bracketing figures,
circles, stars, circle
for men, circle for women.
And those nine or ten
figures depending
on which dancing master you ask,
did not change from cotillion
to cotillion, but there was a new
figure written that intervened
between the bracketing
figures every time.
So in the cotillion format,
once you knew your nine changes
as they called them,
those fixed figures,
all you had to learn
was the new figure,
but it was a relatively long
sequence doing a whole cotillon was
about ten minutes.
And it was succeeded
by the quadrille
and the quadrille does not
have those intervening those
characteristic unchanged
figures time to time.
What it has instead is in effect
five simple four-couple square
dances stuck together, so
they're just stuck together
with five different
tunes to do them to.
There was very little variation in
those quadrille dances from 1815
to oh, now, very little change.
Very occasionally a dancing master
in the 1820s, 1840s would try
to interject a new
dance among the five,
but generally it doesn't takeoff,
so if you see the lancers quadrille
that's pretty much the quadrille;
that's pretty much the quadrille.
The advantages of the
quadrille were twofold.
Like the cotillion, it's
a dance for four couples,
so that meant that you
could exclude the riffraff.
You and seven friends could get
together and do your cotillon,
cotillion and make sure that the
wrong element did not get in.
And quadrille shared that reality
with it, but the other advantage
of the quadrille was that
once you knew the five dances,
you never had to think again.
And so the quadrille with
its relative simplicity
and its exclucivity begins
to push the English country
dance off the stage after 1815.
And its co-conspirator was a dance
of a very different character,
the shocking-shocking waltz, where
you got to stand belly to belly
with your partner arm and
arm and turnaround the floor
and now we are back to the
volta; turning around and round
on the floor and happy
to disregarded every
other couple on the floor.
And so post 1820, the
quadrille in partnership
with some other fairly simple
almost apart again dances
and then interleaved with
mazurkas, waltzes, schottisches,
and other couple dances, push
the English country dance
out into village life essentially,
out into the American colonies
and out into special
occasions like Fezzywig's Ball
or novelty parties,
dressed up parties.
So you will see English country
dances, whether designated as such
or not, turn up as occasional
features in ball programs
through to the end
of the 19th century.
But in effect the form
has all but disappeared.
It is a living dance form out in the
villages, but it has been forgotten
by the greater part of society.
So this is the point at which
Cecil Sharp steps into the story.
On Boxing Day in 1899 he saw a
group of dancers doing, in fact,
a Morris dance and
he was enthralled.
Cecil Sharp was a musician and
a music educator at the end
of the 19th century, into the early
20th century, and he was already
up to his shoulders in the search
for authentic English folk culture
and he had focused his attention
up to that point largely
on English folksong, but here
was an opportunity to invest
in what he viewed as
authentic English folk dance.
First the Morris and the
sword, and then he began
to investigate English country
dances done as social dances
and found a number of them
in the villages and some
of those were tenacious
survivals from the high period
of English country dance in the
18th and early 19th century.
Some of them were new
creations for --
that had occurred in the course of
the 19th century in village life.
And then he began to explore
the Playford collections
and it really is to him
and his pioneering work
that we owe what we know
about English country dance
and our interest in it.
Cecil Sharp has come in for a great
deal of ribbing in the last 20
or 30 years for his
sexism, his high-handedness,
for some wishful thinking
that populated his thinking
about English country dance.
But I think he deserves much
credit given how little was known
or understood about the social
environment of the 17th century
in England, of how the notation
system worked, how little was known
about the Beauchamp-Feuillet
notation system (which Cecil Sharp
did also investigate, in the course
of his researches) given
how little was known
about the social environment
of the time,
the work that he did was
really extraordinary;
really-really remarkable.
And it is, it's stunning to look
back at his dance interpretations
and see how much he got right.
So that's a really striking
triumph on his part.
So Cecil Sharp having
discovered this dance format,
having begun to investigate it in
the Playford collections and began
to publish his findings in "The
Country Dance Book" a book he issued
in six parts, the last at
which was issued posthumously.
And he viewed English country
dance as a number of things.
First it was a wholesome and healthy
alternative to the degraded culture
of the early 20th century.
And there were certain trends and
tendencies that he viewed with alarm
in contemporary culture;
jazz, animal dances.
There were such things.
They were a great craze
across Europe
and if you would mime being
a great big wooly bear.
The cakewalk, Americanism,
and on the other side
the degraded affectations
of pseudo-classical movement.
So being Isadora Duncan
wasn't any better.
And this was wonderful healthy
alternative to all of that.
And this was an opportunity for
England to claim a distinctive,
authentic and rich,
beautiful, home culture.
He noted -- had noted even before he
began his researches into dance --
he had noted with some dismay that
all across Europe through the course
of the 19th century there had been
waves of cultural nationalism,
attempts to both define a national
character and then to find its roots
and define its parameters.
And you can see this going, running
right through Italian culture,
German culture, French
culture all across Europe:
finding your great
national dance form,
finding your greatest
national novelist,
finding your musical style,
finding your national costumes.
The late 19th century is the
great period for national costume.
And the English as he
noted, were somehow lacking
when they were trying to do folk
dance it turned out to be Swedish
and when they sang folksongs
they turned out to be German.
And I've forgotten which music
critic it was who derided England
as "The land without
music; das land ohne musik."
Which must have stung the
English for a longtime.
But here was an authentic English
folk culture and better yet,
as with his musician's background
he investigated the tunes assigned
to the dances, many, many, many of
them were wonderful, rich folksongs.
So there was a rich overlap with the
work that he had already begun to do
in the investigation of
the English folksong.
So here was a full package
of an English folk culture
that he could embrace
and then champion,
and champion it he certainly
did, founding a Folk Dance
and Song Society in England
and coming to this country,
not at all long afterward, in
the midst of the First World War,
and founding similar society in
this country with the reasoning
that given the heavy influx of
English colonization in the 17th
and 18th century he
was justified in trying
to found an English folk dance
society counterpart in this country.
And certainly that was
seized up and embraced
in Boston and New York both.
And I will leave aside for a
moment to the 100 year argument
about whether the Boston Society or
the New York Society is the elder
and we will just take that
outside later [brief laughter].
Hard to believe.
So, where does that leave us now?
In 1990, there's an abrupt
for you, in 1990 Jenny Shimer
and Kitty Keller published a
book called, "The Playford Ball."
What was the Playford Ball?
Well, English country dance in this
country had been through a couple
of waves of success
and then relative ebb.
So the success, there had been
a wave of excitement shortly
after Sharp's visit here
which justified his
foundation of the society.
And there was another
wave of success
in the wake of the Second World War.
And there was another in the wave
of flower power and rock and roll
and all of that back to the
earth good stuff in the 60s,
so in the 1970s and following
another great wave of success.
And this had had these waves
of success had had
several implications.
In the early generations of the
dancing of the Playford tradition
in this country, the work of
Cecil Sharp was sacrosanct,
more than he would have desired.
He was in fact, much more
amendable to change and growth
than his immediate followers
assumed, but as ever in the wake
of the charismatic founder you
have to stiffen up the lines.
So there had been a great deal
of worshipful attention directed
to his dance interpretations and it
meant that, as they were understood,
they were not to be altered
and it meant that one was not
to question the word of the
founder including not peering
over his shoulder at the original
form of the dances as they appeared
in Playford's collections
and following collections.
So in -- then there were
a few rebels early on
but the principle rebel after Cecil
Sharp was another great charismatic
leader, Pat Shaw, who thought that
it was more than justified to take,
as he said, "another
look at Playford."
So he went back into the Playford
Collections sometimes looking
directly over Cecil Sharp's shoulder
at his dance interpretations
and seeing the ways in which Cecil
Sharp had modified those dances
to suit his taste, his whim,
what he thought the needs
of his dancers might be.
And there were many other
collections to look at too.
I should mention as a parenthetical
that, in the wake of Playford,
the Playford family alone did
not publish 30,000 dances,
so there were many
publishers and many,
many collections potentially
to look at.
So Pat Shaw started to take
another look at Playford collections
and in his wake, numerous
other interpreters appeared
who got their hands on
small and large collections
by not only the Playford family
but the Rights, the Walshes,
Johnson collections,
Young collections,
and on and on including
collections from this country.
So what it meant in the context of
circa 1990 was a couple of things;
one that there was an
established and, in some ways,
unquestioned repertoire and that
there was a birging repertoire
of new interpretations
of historical dances.
And much of this material was
fugitive, fugitive in the sense
that Sharp's collections were, I
believe, at that time out of print
and most of the other
dance interpretations
by newer interpreters were
scattered, hard to get,
out of print, out of reach.
And it was Keller and
Shimer's contention
that it would be a good idea to get
their hands around what they viewed
as the core historical
dance repertoire
for the English country
dance community
and it was also their contention
that it would serve that community
to know something about the
background of the dances
and their tunes and their titles
and to have a look at facsimiles
of the first appearances of the
dances in their original form.
This was highly controversial
in 1990
and Jenny Shimer unfortunately
died shortly after the publication
of that book, but Kitty
got a fair amount flack
about that; how could you?
How dare you in effect prompt us
to question the work of Cecil Sharp
by allowing to look at the
differences one to the other?
But I think that that wave of
controversy subsided fairly quickly.
Dancers very rapidly understood what
Cecil Sharp would always have said
which is that he was not, was not
recreating 1651 or 1700, he was not.
He was generating good effective
dances that would serve his dancers,
his country and his community.
He knew, he knew very
well what he was doing
and he would not have viewed
it as problematic to look
at these original sources
and he himself even
before he died was prepared
to make certain revisions
to his early suggestions.
So he did not view his work
with the kind of fixity
that his immediate followers did.
So that collection, The Playford
Ball was, I think it's fair
to say epoch making for the
English country dance community.
It did for a longtime define
a repertoire and some number
of dance leaders, at least used
to, refer to it as "the Bible."
Yes exactly.
And have been joking in
perhaps questionable taste
that now unfortunate we'll
have to refer to that as the
"Old Testament," now we
have the "New Testament"
which only fulfills the promise
of the old, that's all I'm saying.
We love them both.
We love them both --
little theology joke.
But it was an epoch-making volume
and for quite some time defined
the historical dance repertoire,
but in the 25 years since its
publication 25 and a little,
there have been a number of changes.
The greatest change
is the simple flood
of new historical dance
interpretations largely due
to the work of Kitty Keller
and her husband Bob Keller who,
in several years after the
publication of the printed book,
made available scans of every dance
in all of the Playford collections
and that was an extraordinary
gift to the historical community,
as well as, the dance community.
So that meant not only
that you could peer
over Cecil Sharp's shoulder
and Pat Shimer's shoulder,
but that you could make your own
finds and find your own dances
to interpret, which has happened
with a vengeance in the last 15
or 20 years, as well as,
intrepid dance scholars
and dance interpreters finding
dances in other kinds collections,
in Walsh collections, in Right
collections and other collections.
And there was an additional little
wave of interest in American dances
of course following
our own bicentennial
which is a little before
the Playford Ball.
So a huge influence of new-old
repertoire to think about.
So those dances just as had been
the case with the dances featured
in the Playford Ball were many
of them in effect fugitive.
And in many respects this
situation was even worse a couple
of years ago before I started this
process than it had been in 1990,
because there are so
many interpreters
and possible places
one could locate dance.
And many wonderful historical dances
were being passed hand-to-hand
from caller to caller scribbled on
a notecard or Xeroxed desperately
out of an out of print volume.
So it appealed to me several
years ago to approach the English,
the Country Dance and
Song Society and say,
"We should have another collection.
We should have another set."
And for a variety of reasons
that process tailed off,
but two years ago Pat McPherson
who was the education director
at Country Dance and Song
Society approached me
to restart the project.
And so here we are now, two years
later and with this new collection.
And so this new collection,
I'll briefly say before
we begin our dance,
this new collection was
assembled a little bit differently
from the Playford Ball.
The Playford Ball in effect was
the historical dance repertoire
of Jenny Shimer, one
of the co-editors,
and as such it reflected the
historical dance repertoire
of her friend and collaborator
May Gadd.
But I wanted a more
democratic process.
So I asked, I worked my way
through every new historical
dance interpretation I could find
to glean a few of the best pieces
and I turned to a small committee
and solicited their opinions
of all of those dances.
I also had a small gallery of
what I called "scouts" who told me
about favorites of their own
that I might not know
or might not know well.
So it was a more democratized
process.
And in the creation of this
book I want to do a couple
of new things not only to
assemble 125 dances that we loved
or we're going to come to love,
but also to continue the great
work of Keller and Shimer.
So this volume, as its predecessor
does, has background on the tunes,
the titles, the tracts
and the movements
which sometimes is a
different question.
And I wanted even more than the
Playford Ball, than Kitty had time
to do in her creation of
Playford Ball, to give a sense
of the context of the dances.
As I say in the book,
"The past is gone.
I will not return.
We cannot recreate 1670 or 1730,
but these dances, their tunes,
their titles invoked a rich web
of association for the people
who danced them when they were new."
And I'll briefly talk a little
bit about some of the context
for individual dances as we do them.
So those dances and their tunes
carried meaning in a way that is --
I think is worthwhile to
try to recover and for me,
that stands at the heart of part
of the project of the book which is
to continue to evoke the dances as
a living tradition and to the degree
that I cannot only offer these
dances to contemporary dancers
and dance historians, but to
reawaken the train of associations
that connects us now not only to
each other but to the interpreters
who have come before as Christine
Helwig or Fried Herman or Pat Shaw
or Cecil Sharp, but back on through
them, through these rich tunes
and the world that they evoke all
the way back to the dance floors
of 1612 or 1788 and to me that's
the power of the tradition.
And for us, for these dances,
we dance them as social dances.
They are, as we say the
Country Dance and Song Society,
we are after the performative arts.
It's one reason that we, you will
not see our dancers in a uniform.
We're not all wearing
black and white.
We're not all wearing cocked
hats, because we come to this
as social dancers as
they would have done
in the 17th and the 18th century.
We come not exactly as we are, but
we come as we would like to be.
We come to the dance floor
with best foot forward,
but we come out of social life
and it's an expression
of social relationship.
It's a way to create a transitory
but meaningful art altogether
and so I think, I'm almost
at the end of my remarks,
and I think I can say that that's
a pretty good case for thinking
of English country dance in
its American cousin format
as an authentic living folk culture
with deep connections to the past.
Alright, I'm going to
conclude where my book begins.
I'll go in reverse order of
the epigraphs, so two epigraphs
to my book; one from Carl
Whitman who has been long dead now
but he was a very smart historian
of the Playford tradition
and a champion of
gender-role-neutral dancing
which I will explain out
in the lobby afterward
if you're interested.
Here's the word from Carl Wittman,
"The country dance form can be
thought of as an exquisite vessel
in itself beautiful in
shape highly abstract.
We can choose to feel this vessel
with whatever meaning we like,
if we like we can pursue
a particular friendship.
We can rejoice in a
sense of community.
We can see in the music and dance
the highest of spiritual values;
We can see it as good fun.
The dances all of these and greater
than all of them and as teachers
and dancers we must strive
to perceive the dance
in its most abstract and
neutral form so as not
to impose our particular
meaning onto others.
The wonderful treasure
which is has been passed
down to us is the spirit,
the infrastructure,
this has manifested itself in
various ways through the centuries
and continues today
in this new form."
And here's a word from
Friedrich Schiller,
the German dramatist and poet.
"The first law of human relations is
to respect the freedom
of the other person.
The second law is to act
out your own freedom.
Fulfilling these laws at precisely
the same time is extremely
difficult, but essential for
harmonious social relations.
I know of no better example for
seeing these laws operating together
in practice than in the
figures of a well-danced,
well-composed English country dance.
A spectator sees countless
movements crossing
in an infinite variety everything
takes place in such a way
that one has already
made room for the other.
Everything fits so cleverly
and yet artlessly together;
it is the most perfect example
of an individual freedom
and the respected freedom
of the other."
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
Thank you.
I will invite my dancers and
my musicians to the stage.
[ Inaudible Question ]
Go ahead and form up.
So the first dance I will
not be in, so I will show it:
the dancers will show you without
my assistance except a few words
from me.
This is "Graise Inne Maske."
It does come from the first edition
of Playford's English
Dancing Masters, 1651.
This an interpretation
by Fried de Metz Herman
and the dance is interesting
for a couple of reasons;
one is that it is this fixed format,
so you'll see the dancers
interact substantially
but they'll end exactly where
they begin; it is also old.
It's not only 1651, but the
tune certainly goes back to 1613
and the dance in some form may
have been danced as early as that.
The tune is by Giovanni Coprario and
it's associated with a song uttered
by Tom O' Bedlam who was a
folkloric madman figure and so
and the dance is associated
with the wedding festivities
of James I's daughter Elizabeth
and her husband Frederick
Elector Palatine in 1613.
Graise Inne was one of the
residential Inns for lawyers
in the city of London and this
tune certainly in the song featured
as part of the entertainment
offered for that wedding couple.
So the dance may be
almost 50 years older
than its first publication
date in some format and I want
to ask the dancers to show a "hey
for three," so along the men's line
and that middle woman there,
Joanna, she's a guy for right now.
She is a dude.
So the three men are going
to show you a hey for three
and it is a weaving figure.
The dancers make figure eight tracks
on the floor if you think of them
as being followed by
little chalk marks
on the floor you'll
see loops of eights.
Joanna is starting in
the middle of the eight
and the two Davids are starting at
each end of the eight, so go ahead
and do a hey for three right
shoulder, [wordless singing].
You see that loop?
And they end where they began.
So there it is the hey, the
Hey Duggee which is sort
of a heart-home figure home
figure for English country dance.
So I will be prompting my
dancers off the microphone,
you'll hear me anyway
given this hall,
I'll just say as a historical
note that would not have happened
in the 17th or 18th century.
My instruction would all have
happened either in their homes
or at my private dancing academy
and I probably wouldn't have ranked
enough to be invited to the dance
where they did the dance.
So the idea of prompting
as dancers move
and that dancing master attending
the event wouldn't have happened,
but here we are 2016.
Alright, so we will start
double back start right here.
We're ready.
[ Music/Dance ]
To your own wall!
[inaudible instructions
for the dancers]
[ Music/Dance ]
[ Applause ]
So that was "Graise Inne Maske."
And you note that one of
the characteristics of some
of the older dances was a strong
duple meter and it changes.
The sub-divisions change.
You get double sub-divisions
dum-pum-pum [wordless singng].
The basic strong meter is duple.
And it takes them a while
to embrace other meters.
But we'll see that in the very next
dance, which is "News from Tripoli."
[pause]
So this dance is in the
meter or the musical format
that is sometimes called
the hornpipe.
The old English hornpipe,
disticinct from, not the same as,
the sailor's hornpipe, which is a
duple meter dance and form which is
about one hundred or one hundred and
fifty years later than this form.
But here it is, the triple meter.
And it was a wonderful
feature of English music
in the late seventeenth century
into the early eighteenth century.
Beautiful tune.
Let me say a little about the
baffling title, "News from Tripoli."
Very little to do with the
country or the location.
And, I said to a friend of mine two
years ago, "When I know what 'News
from Tripoli' means I
will be almost done."
Sure enough I do.
And it was a catch phrase
used in the coffee houses
that were a feature of English
life from the 1660s forward
until tea took over, essentially.
The coffee houses that were
called the "penny universities,"
where anyone could come
in and have a sip and talk
to the likes of Jonathan Swift.
"News from Tripoli" is your
warm up for a crummy joke,
generally of the toast-master
variety.
Such as "The news from Tripoli is
that a shoemaker is the best man
to make a constable because
he can put a man in the stocks
and ease him at the last."
[Audience groans] You see?
You see? It's the kind of joke
you follow with "Wah, wah."
Yeah, terrible, terrible jokes.
But it was a standard in the coffee
houses, and often the waiter,
the coffee boy, would come
up and say "What's the news?
What's the news from Tripoli?
What can I get you sir?"
And perhaps he would be
punished by hearing one of these.
But the tune is just splendid.
So the tune is absolutely rewarding.
We're going to show
you the first figure.
So the figure of eight, which is
different kind of a weaving figure,
and we are going to show you this
variant of it, which is a "cast,"
which means looping out to move
to a neighboring place
and a weaving figure.
Again, we are doing eight tracks
on the floor, but it is a figure
for two, so it is in a way a
refinement of the old "hey."
So we are going to
show you, these four,
and our neighbors will
accomodate us by moving.
We cast, and here the figure
eight starts, here is a loop --
one loop of the eight, and we pass,
and here is the other
loop of the eight.
But, you know, England is sort of
democratic so they get to do it too.
So they cast, we move.
They go around thier partner,
around their neighbors,
back to their original places.
So that's not the progressive
figure,
that happens a little later on.
So here it is, the figure of
eight on the diagonal with a cast.
And it opens "News from Tripoli."
[to the performers] So let's do,
I think let's do three times.
Three times the tune.
[Music]
[applause]
Now we move -- that
was a dance from 1701.
Now we move forward to 1766.
This will be "Round About Our Coal
Fire," a very, very popular tune,
sometimes called "Old
Simon, the King."
In are many, many variants which
are spelled out in the book,
which you may have for yourself.
This is a wonderful dance and
a wonderful tune and a tune
that you may recognize
from other uses.
It seems suitable for this
occasion because this dance and tune
and the name were really associated
with this season of the year.
The phrase came back into
circulation in the 1730s
with a book called "Round
About Our Coal Fire"
by the pseudonomous Tom Merryman.
And he says very specifically, "The
dancing and singing by the Benchers
in the great inns of
court in Christmas is
in some sort founded upon"
-- and so on and so on --
"for they hold, as I am informed,
some privelige by dancing
about the fire in the middle of
their hall and singing the song
of "Round About Our Coal Fire."
Here we are.
And, he says "Country dancing
is one of the chief exercises.
Moll Peatly and the Black
Joak are never forgot.
These dances stir the
blood and give the males
and females a fellow feeling
of each other's activity,
ability, and agility."
So we're going to show you
one of the figures here.
So, before I get into the longways,
I am going to ask the
dancers to show you.
As you saw the "hey for three,"
that core English country dance
figure in "Graise Inne Maske."
And now we are going to get a
little variant of it with the ones
that are closest to you here.
And we'll just show
you in the top four.
They will be will be
doing a "hey for three."
How is this to be done
with with two people?
Well, it isn't.
The twos will abet them.
The second woman will come
in and she will do a hey
for three passing her corner
left, go ahead Caroline.
So there is that weave,
the eights on the floor.
The second man comes
in and takes over.
He passes his right
corner shoulder to begin.
So there it is, that core figure.
The weave, the hey.
So this is "Round About
Our Coal Fire."
As was increasingly popular in
dances from the 1730s forward,
this is what they called
the "double dance."
What they meant by that was,
you heard the tune twice quite
through to do the dance
once through.
So you will here the tune start
again before we finish our
progressive figure.
So here it goes."
[inaudible instructions
to performers]
[Music]
[applause]
So now we move to America,
as I promised.
The great dance from these
shores is the composition
of a fellow named John Griffiths
who was a dancing master primarily
in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and
Connecticut, and then in New York
where he seems to have settled.
This is "The Young Widow."
The prevailing format of English
country dance was what we now call
-- they wouldn't have
said so at the time --
but we now call it triple minor,
meaning that you have a leading
couple and two supporting couples.
One of the innovations
of Cecil Sharp was
to democratize the form
whereever possible and conveniant
to make every other couple active,
and most of the dance tracts make
that possible, not all of them.
But this dance with its
wonderful sprightly tune is,
I think, a real masterpiece.
And it was Griffith's work.
And it as a fabulous progressive
figure and the perfect thing
for a burgeoning democracy.
The ones lead for a little while and
then, with the greatest ingenouity,
the twos and threes
take over the action
and control their own destinies.
They make their progression
happen around the ones.
So its a great moment and
you will see it in operation.
[inaudible instructions
to performers]
[Music]
[applause]
We will do one more dance for
you, we have just enough time.
We will go back, we'll
go back a few decades
to "Barbarini's Tambourine"
[sounds from audience] Oh,
it has it's own fan club!
That's fine, I am a
great fan of this.
I can't think of a dance that has
made more people more happy than
"Barbarini's Tambourine."
It was named for an absoutely
extrordinary woman of the period,
Barbara Campanini,
whose professional
and amorous carrier I
will not even attempt
to summarize here [laughter], but
you will have to go to my book
and take a look and then
you can do your own reading.
There have been three
movies made about her
and that probably is not the end.
There's a stamp, a
Barbara Campanini stamp.
This dance was probably not
her composition but was written
to honor her triumph in
London in the early 1740s.
The tune might, might, just
might possibly be by Rameau,
but it certainly evokes
the tambourin dance form
that he specialized in writing for.
This was one of her
signature dance types.
So that tambourin, by the way,
was a long drum, not the timbrel,
although she was painted
with a timbrel.
Here is "Barbarini's Tambourine."
[inaudible instructions
to performers]
[Music]
[applause]
So we are almost out of
time, but I may be able
to accomodate -- oh, maybe not.
Any quick questions?
I can entertain some questions
in the lobby afterward I suppose.
Right, ok, thank you all very much.
[applause]
Thank you all for your kindness.
And please, a warm round of
applause for my wonderful dancers!
David [Roodman], David [Shewmaker],
Mary [Jones], Caroline [Barnes],
Stephanie [Smith], Cynthia [Whear],
Joanna [Reiner Wilkinson],
Eric [Masters].
My musicians Liz [Donaldson],
David Knight.
Thank you all.
female voice: This has
been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.