pennsicdance: Dance Music at Pennsic

[Alex Clark]

At 09:32 AM 8/28/2005 -0400, Octavio de Flores wrote:
>5.  How does Black Nag (1673) escape the Pennsic OOP restriction?  If you
>argue that it is "similar to" Playford 1, it opens up a pandora's box of
>opinions about why my favorite dance is "like" Playford 1.

Black Nag (1657) is very similar to Millison's Jig (1651) in both its 
figures and its music. Of the three parts that Black Nag is divided into, 
the first seems to be identical, the second might be identical except that 
opposite corners change places instead of end couples with their partners, 
and only the third part is more than a little bit different. The biggest 
difference is that Millison's Jig ends with the first couple at the bottom, 
which suggests to me that it should be repeated until all couples have 
returned to their places. BTW, this partly justifies the adaptation of 
Black Nag where the first couple casts to the bottom for another repeat of 
the dance, although an adaptation that gets the first couple to the bottom 
by the end of the last figure would be better justified.

The only other dances from early editions of Playford other than the first 
that seem to be widely known in the SCA are Trenchmore and Sellengers 
Round. It seems to me that both of these dances have bigger problems with 
reconstruction, and I seriously doubt that the versions of the latter that 
are frequently done in the SCA could be correct.

-- 
Henry/Alex