We're using cookies to make this site more secure, featureful and efficient.
5 April 2022: Fun with Reels of Four
On the Tuesday after the ball I would have counted on a few more than
7 dancers, but presumably the others prefer to put their legs up. No
problem! And not a reason to skip the last session before the Easter
holidays in the state of Hesse entirely.
After our usual warm-up routine we amused ourselves with the
Elephant Walk, a relatively silly ceilidh dance
(perhaps it is time to start over with the more mainstream ceilidh
dances). After a brief skip-change-of-step practice we started on the
motto of the evening, “Fun with Reels of four”.
The first dance was Elizabeth Adair by Hugh Foss,
from his Angus Fitchet Scottish Dance Album with dances to
music by Angus Fitchet, a fiddler and contemporary of
Foss’s. The book contains 16 dances, most of which are hardly ever
danced (at least here in Germany); the only exception is that modern
classic, J. B. Milne, which however required quite some time
after the publication of the book in 1954 to become really
popular. Elizabeth Adair stands out because it features a
continuous 12-bar one and a half reel of four
across the dance, a formation which is seldom seen
elsewhere. Incidentally it is a completely symmetrical dance – the 1st
man does exactly what the 2nd woman does, while the 1st lady and 2nd
man are also doing the same thing. For a mathematician like Foss this
was perhaps an intriguing property.
From Hugh Foss we moved to another very creative dance author,
Barry Priddey, and his dance The Pool Of Connla. This
four-couple strathspey combines half reels of four on the sidelines
with half reels of four across the dance – the former are extended a
little to enable a direct transition into the latter. I originally
learned this dance from Frans Ligtmans in the second half of
the 1990s, and it enjoyed a brief period of popularity during which it
even made it onto a Frankfurt ball programme (that was in 1997). I
still like it and it would be worth dancing very beautifully during a
display! The dance is dedicated to the late Anna Holden, the famous teacher from Birmingham Branch and
long-standing director of Summer School; in early Irish mythology, the
Pool
of Connla is the source of knowledge, and that is an allusion to the
authority of her teaching.
In RSCDS Book 45 there is The Westminster Reel, by
Jeremy Hill – like
Elizabeth Adair a two-couple dance, which instead of a reel of
four across the dance contains a diagonal reel of four, namely between
1st man’s and 2nd woman’s places. It also features a nice variation on
Set and Rotate where one sets to the person diagonally
opposite rather than one’s partner. I personally prefer this to the
“official” version, where the cast is more uncomfortable from some
places than from others. The dance itself originally appeared in the
London Jubilee Book of 1989,
and by the time Book 45 came out, it was already established to a
point where the Society, when it became obvious that the wrong tune
had been printed in Book 45, wasn’t able to double down as usual but
had to issue a correction.
After the break we continued with The Scamp by David G Queen from the Whiteadder Collection (pronounced
“Whit-Adder”). This dance is funny because it contains diagonal reels
of four with corners where 1st couple leave the reel after 2 bars to
chase around the set to the other end of the reel and then reenter the
reel for bars 7–8 of the phrase. In the meantime the second corners
take 1st couple’s place in the reel; they dance clockwise to the end
of the reel, assume the role of 1st couple for bars 3–6 of the phrase,
and leave the reel on bars 7–8 to return to their starting places. In
a nutshell, the 1st and 3rd men move on a triangle marked by 1st man’s
place, 3rd woman’s place, and 3rd man’s place. 1st and 2nd women,
similarly, move on a triangle marked by 1st man’s place, 1st woman’s
place, and 3rd woman’s place. Afterwards the same movement is of
course repeated on the other diagonal, where 1st couple starts the
reel towards their 4th corners (partner’s 2nd corners). These reels
resemble the Weasel Reel, with the difference that in the
latter, all dancers leave the reel temporarily to dance a chase,
while in The Scamp, first corners dance a complete reel.
In fact I had prepared a dance with a “genuine” weasel reel, but
didn’t manage to teach it due to time constraints. Instead we applied
ourselves to another Hugh Foss dance, namely The Thrums Cairn from the Glendarroch Scottish Country Dance Sheets of
1970. In this dance, 1st couple dances the track of a diagonal reel of
four with first (and later second) corners, while the corners
themselves are dancing Rights and Lefts (first “normally”,
later starting up and down the sidelines). Yet another nice variation!
All in all it was a pleasant evening with fun dances to fill the time
between the ball and the Easter holidays. Regular classes will
continue on 26 April.