From: justin@inmet.camb.inmet.COM (Justin du Coeur MKA Mark Waks)
Subject: Lefties; Ages; LRPG; Handwriting; Asst'd Dance Topics
Organization: The Internet
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 21:15:45 GMT

Re: An Abundance of Lefties

Several people have noted that there seem to be a lot of left-handed folk
in the last rounds of Crown Tournies. Several people have offered
explanations, but I haven't seen what I thought was the obvious one:
lefties have something of an advantage of experience. A left-handed
fighter typically spends most of his time fighting right-handed people,
and is therefore used to it. Most righties don't have nearly as much
experience fighting left-handers, though. Statistically, it makes sense
that this would give the lefties a small edge...

(Of course, this is all from a non-fighter's perspective, so I could
be completely off-base...)


Re: New/Middle/Old Guard

I think that Tibor is basically on-target here: the *useful* meanings
of new/middle/old guard have much more to do with attitude than with
how long you've actually been around. Note a consequence of this: it's
quite possible to change which "guard" you are in, in *either* direction.
I've seen a fair number of old-time Carolingians, who had very much
been part of the mostly-burned-out Old Guard, revive and get back into
the swing of things, winding up once more in the broad Middle Guard.

Personally, I aspire to keeping myself as new-guard as I reasonably
can...


Re: LRPG as an SCA Splinter?

Gwenllian speculates that Live Gaming groups seem to be an SCA splinter.

Some might be, but many certainly aren't. The biggest LRPG group
in this region, NERO, seems to have only minimal overlap with the
Society (I only know of one or two cross-members), and the Interactive
Literature groups (SIL & ILF), while having a rather higher crossover
rate, were started by people with no particular SCA connection...


Re: Period Handwriting

Fiammetta mentions Domenico's sometimes-less-than-legible handwriting,
and Serena points out that day-to-day period handwriting wasn't 
necessarily beautiful, any more than it is today -- books tended to
be written with far more care than correspondence. It's worth
pointing out that Domenico *is* a book; it's fairly well organized,
and clearly intended for the long term. I don't know if it was
written by Domenico or a scribe, though.

What's particularly amusing about this book is that it was clearly
written under deadline pressure. The introduction is quite neat; if
our facsimile were a few generations earlier, I suspect it would be
fairly easy to read. As the dances go along, the writing starts to
very gradually get a bit looser. Finally, by the end of the book,
the dances are being written in an extremely loose and fast-looking
scribble, that looks very much like someone was doing it at about
3 in the morning. There doesn't appear to be a handwriting change --
it just looks like the scribe was badly under the gun towards the end...


Re: Period Dance, Take One

Vashti writes, on the subject of tiring dances:
>Some that come to mind are Galliards, which have lots of little kicks and 
>leaps, and the bransles that can get faster and faster until either
>the musicians or the dancers have to stop because they've run out of steam.

Which brings up an interesting question: is there any period evidence
for suiciding a dance? It's standard SCA practice for bransles, and
it wouldn't surprise me much if they did it to some degree in period,
but I can't think of any references to such a practice, myself...

On the subject of SCA dance manuals, she writes:
>I probably own 10 or so SCA dance
>manuals, and about four  translations from period. The NORDSKOGEN DANCE
>MANUAL was the first of many, and is still a good one.  THE LETTERS OF
>DANCE published by Master Justin,  and the accompanying TAPE OF
>DANCE are also quite good.

It's worth noting that The Nordskogen Dance Manual per se is (I think)
long out of print, but it has been superceded by The Rose & Nefr Dance
Manual, which gets advertised regularly in TI and a zillion other
places. This is probably the best single starting place for an SCA
dancer. It covers pretty much every form of period dance at least
lightly. The historical details are rather light, but the instructions
are fairly clear. It includes two tapes of music for the dances, and
generally the melody line for each dance. It's far from The Perfect
SCA Dance Manual, but it's as good as I've seen for the beginner...

I thank Vashti for the Letter of Dance plug, but it's worth noting
that the Letter is only so-so for actually getting dance reconstructions.
About a third of the Letter is actual dance descriptions; the rest
is articles about period dance, and letters discussing it.

One more tape/book for people to keep an eye out for: The St. Cecelia's
Consort dance tapes (there are two), and Fiddle's Dance Notes (I forget
the exact title) by Fidelico de Rochefort. The books are quite concise,
but decently useable, and the tapes are very pretty. There is one book
for each tape, with color-matched covers...


Re: Period Dance, Take Two -- Longways Dances in Playford

Ellisif questions the assertion that Playford's longways dances are
less period in style than his other dances, given that there are a
passel of them in the first edition. I'll try to explain the logic
here.

Playford's dances (*very* roughly) divide into four categories:

-- circular dances for a specific number of couples (note that I am
   considering 4-couple square dances, and dances for one couple facing
   one couple, to be effectively circles)
-- circular dances for as many as will
-- line dances for 3 or 4 couples
-- longways dances for as many as will

The circular ones are clear evolutions from period forms; they've changed
a bit, but the mutations aren't *too* dramatic. The circular-for-many
dances appear to have grown out of bransles. The dances for two
couples or small circles are more-or-less mutations of the late
16th century Italian stuff -- again, the dances have changed a bit,
but there's still a lot of similarity.

The line dances for 3 or 4 couples introduce a "weirdness"; I don't
know of many previous dances that use this formation (although I
believe that a few existed). They still behave somewhat like
the Italian set dances, though.

The longways dances introduce another weirdness, by extending the
line indefinitely, dividing it into sub-sets, and having these
subsets changing couples regularly. I tend to draw a line at two
"weirdnesses" (a concept I admit I filched from the heralds) --
it's getting a bit too far from anything I know from pre-1600 for
me to comfortably believe that it was done then.

There is also an argument from fashion. Dance tends to evolve;
styles come in, become fashionable for a while, and drift out
of the repertoire. There is no question that longways dances were
on an upswing in 1651 -- over the next 50 years, they pretty much
drive out everything else. Indeed, longways EC dances appear to
characterize early English baroque dance in much the same way that
the galliard characterizes late Renaissance. This suggests strongly
that the longways dances were the hot new thing in the mid-century,
and *probably* had been created sometime in the decade or two
before then.

All of this is admittedly weak evidence -- it's more-or-less an
"absence of evidence" argument. It's enough so that I won't generally
teach the longways dances, but weak enough that I don't worry about
them much; there's certainly ample room to disagree...

(Note that, despite the fact that Hole in the Wall is itself rather
late, it's not particularly worse than the rest of its genre. Aside
from being a longways dance, there's nothing *terribly* odd about it,
except that it's rather dull. How it's usually done in the SCA is
another matter entirely...)

(Caveat to all of the above: I haven't studied EC dance *nearly* as
much as some of the earlier forms. There may well be some points
I'm missing...)


Re: Period Dance, Take Three -- Lines of Couples

Del quotes a message from Richard that I haven't seen yet:
>> On the question for dances "longwayes for as many as will",
>> However, it is important to note that in none of our period sources from
>> the 16th century, including Caroso, Negri and Arbeau.  Arbeau, in fact, 
>> never explicitly mentions that a basse dance or pavan should be danced by
>> a long line of couples.  I might be more willing to accept such a longways
>> dance if there were any precedents at all in the period repertoire.

Now *that* is the most interesting observation I've seen in a dog's age.
I have *always* heard the received wisdom that basse dances and pavans
are processional dances, and have never seen them danced in any other
way. But doing a quick dig through the two sources that I have on
hand that pertain to it (Arbeau and the Brussels MS, one of the main
basse dance sources), Richard's right -- it doesn't ever really say that
these dances are processional.

This is really, really fascinating. If the pavan was *not* processional,
it would explain one problem I've always had with Arbeau's description:
the conversion. Arbeau spends a little while talking about how to do
a pavan if the hall isn't long enough. The main suggestion he makes is
to simply circle around the hall, which is almost invariably the way
it's done in the Society. But he also describes the conversion, whereby
you turn around at the end of the hall, by the gentleman backing up while
the lady continues to process forward.

The problem is, if this is done in a column, you either a) will 
immediately crash into the couple that was behind you, or b) have to
indicate to the entire line to "convert" at once. Neither of these
is exactly satisfactory, and the problem has bugged me for quite
some time. But if the pavan is only intended for a single couple at
a time, then the problem vanishes.

The more I think about this, the more sense this makes. The wording in
Arbeau makes a *lot* of sense if you assume that he's talking about
a single couple. He talks about how you are supposed to take your
lady, and place yourselves at one end of the room. This does *not*
sound like our usual "line up in a circle of couples" formation.
Further, he talks about how, once you've set yourselves up at one
end of the room, another couple can set up at the far end, and you
dance until you encounter one another, at which point you retreat
or do a conversion.

Balanced against this, we have a couple of sections in Arbeau that
seem to imply that it is at least *sometimes* done processionally,
to show off. First, he says (about the pavan),

	"Our musicians play it when a damsel of good family is taken
	 to Holy Church to be married or when musicians head a
	 procession of the chaplains, master and brethren of some
	 notable guild."

A little further on, he says,

	"... it is used by kings, princes, and great lords to display
	 themselves... and then the queens, princesses and great ladies
	 accompany them with the long trains of their dresses let down
	 and trailing behind them, or sometimes carried by damsels.
	 And these pavans, played by hautboys and sackbuts, are called
	 the Grand Bal, and last until those who dance have circled
	 two or three times round the room. These pavans are also used
	 in a masquerade when there is a procession of triumphal
	 chariots of gods and goddesses, emporers or kings resplendent
	 with majesty."

(Quotes from the Cyril Beaumont translation, which happens to be what
I have at work.)

Put this all together, and what do you have? It sounds to me like
Arbeau is describing a dance with a couple of different uses. When
used formally, it is done as a procession, but probably with a fair
bit of room between the dancers. (The great lords are showing off,
after all, and the ladies have long trains.) When done as a social
dance, it sounds like it is intended for at most a small number of
couples of the floor. Fascinating...

Okay, here's a possibly-hard question for the dance mavens out there:
what evidence, if any, *is* there for the pavan and basse dance as
a *social* line-of-couples dance? Is there art that indicates it? Del
gives a reference to a basse dance that appears to be for a line of
couples -- how many other such references are there, and are they
written in such a way as to indicate that this might be unusual?
I'd love it if someone were to look into this a bit, and maybe write
a letter or article for the Letter of Dance...

(Two caveats on the above. First, the above comments are strictly
off the top of my head, and shouldn't be interpreted as well-researched.
Second, one has to take Arbeau with a grain of salt here -- he as much
as admits that the basse dance is dead by the time he is writing, and
implies that the pavan isn't any too healthy, either...)

				-- Justin du Coeur
				   Bouncy dance-type person

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