There's a popular dance in the modern English country dance community which I often cite as a dance that has a Regency "feel" to it, albeit with some quibbles about the details. That doesn't make it a Regency-era dance (it's decades too early), but it's an earlier version of the same style popular in the Regency and uses some figures that remained popular into the first quarter of the nineteenth century. That makes it a reasonable dance to use for a Regency/Jane Austen event in the absence of dancers and/or a caller who can handle dancing in actual period style. But it doesn't make the modern dance a good historical reconstruction even for its own era (leaving aside how close that is or isn't to the Regency era) without some major fixing up.
The tune "Fandango" and a lengthy set of figures appeared together in Thompson's Twenty Four Country Dances for the Year 1774 and were reprinted around 1780 in Thompson's Compleat Collection of 200 Fashionable Country Dances, Volume 4, which collected dances from previous years into a single larger volume. Dances of this era were not locked pairings of tunes and figures in the modern style, so I don't think of the figures as a dance called "Fandango". The same figures could be done, at the dancers' discretion, to a different tune, or the same tune could be used for different figures without disconcerting anyone in the late eighteenth century. The tune is a good one, so there's no reason not to use it. So let's see about those figures...
The image below (click to enlarge) is taken from the 1780 reprint:
This is a 64-bar figure, somewhat on the long side for this era, and the strain markers in the text suggest an AABBAABB pattern for the music. The modern adaptation is credited to W. S. Porter, 1931, in The Playford Ball, a modern English country dance overview by Kate Van Winkle Keller and Genevieve Shimer which is pleasingly thorough about citing sources and reconstructors. Porter turned the original triple minor dance into one for a short set of three couples only, with each couple dancing once instead of twice and doing a double progression. A YouTube search will easily turn up videos of modern dancers performing the Porter version.
Porter made some significant alterations and additions to the figure to warp it into a three-couple dance. I'm going to go through the dance piece by piece looking at these changes and giving a more historically-accurate reconstruction of the dance. Note that "more historically accurate" does not imply a negative judgment about how fun a dance the modern adaptation is, only about its faithfulness to the original figure sequence.
I'm not going to discuss steps for each part, but I do want to note that Porter at various points gives shifts from walking to skipping or "slipping", which would be unnecessary in a historical context because no one would just be walking at any point in the dance.
Figure by figure comparison: original vs. modern adaptation
Original:
A1 Turn Right hands & cast off 1 Cu.
A2 turn Left hands and cast off below the 3d. Cu.
Modern:
A1 First couple turn R hands (4b), cast down to second place (4b), second couple up on last 2b
A2 First couple turn L hands (4b), cast down to third place (4b), third couple up on last 2b
The first sixteen bars of the dance are very straightforward. My only note would be that diagrams for this figure show not a turn to places and then a separate cast off and slide down the set, but a continuous curving path. While casting off has mutated by this time away from the curved path in favor of a sideways slide, with or without a turn, (see my previous discussion of casting off), when it is done as part of a longer figure, the curved path remains. That's how it's done modern style as well.
Original:
B1 hands 6 round
B2 lead up the middle & cast off 1 Cu.
Modern:
B1 Hands six round (left) and back, slipping
B2 First couple lead up to top and cast down to second place, third couple moving down (6b)
First couple meet and turn single, man to right, woman to left (2b)
Here's where we begin to get changes from the historical instruction. "Hands six round" comes up in Thompson in three ways: "Hands six round", "Hands six quite round", and "Hands six half round & back again". All of these are eight-bar figures. With no explicit instruction to go round and back, I would go with a simple circle quite round to the left. Aesthetically, the half round and back is nicer at the bottom of a longways set (when only two couples are available), but that's not what the instructions say.
In the B2 section, Porter seems to think there was too much time available, so he adds a meet and turn single down the set that simply doesn't exist in the original.
For a dance this early, I would go with a "lead up" that involves joining near hands and moving forward (rather than taking two hands and galloping) then casting off by moving forward in a curving path as above, which is congruent with modern style, but adjusting step length and path to use the music fully and arrive in the second place at the end of the strain.
Original:
A1 turn corners & turn your Part.
A2 the same at the other corners
Modern:
A1 First man turn third woman two-hands while first woman turn second man two-hands (4b); first couple turn two hands in center (4b)
A2 First man turn second woman two-hands three-quarters (4b) while first woman turn third man two-hands three-quarters; first couple turn two-hands once-and-a-half (skipping and increasing speed of turn (4b)
This appears to be a variation on the "turn corners" figure I recently discussed. But unlike the Regency versions given there, this version gets a generous sixteen bars of music, and presents an interesting problem of interpretation.
The figure here is clearly not the Regency "turn corners", which involves only corner turns, the two active dancers merely passing each other. A plain "turn corners" with no further detail turns up in Thompson figures with only eight bars allowed, which would better match the Regency version. This is something more elaborate.
The instructions do not specify right and left hands for the turns, as they do in the opening figures of the dance. In the Regency era, "turn" meant to use two hands and "swing" meant one hand, but the Thompson manuals of the 1770s do not use "swing" at all, instead using "turn" for both one- and two-hand turns. This is consistent with Nicholas Dukes' figure manual (published c1752), in which he uses "turn" for single-hand turns in a "turn corners" figure that involves a sequence of corner-partner-corner-partner turns like that described here. That usage was still hanging on to some degree as late as 1808, when Thomas Wilson described "turn partners" as a right-hand turn.
So the lack of specified hands would immediately suggest two-hand turns, but it might also mean that there was no need to mention specific hands because the figure was a standard one and the dancers would know what to do, as they would in the bare "turn corners". Four two-hand turns in eight bars would be a bit awkward to dance, but in sixteen bars it is entirely possible. It's overly generous, in fact, for a "turn corners" figure, and Porter modified the figure a bit to add an extra turn, presumably to use up more of the music. Since the active dancers need only turn about halfway (after cutting the second corner turn slightly short for flow) to get back to places, eight bars for the last two turns is a lot of music. Porter fixes this by adding an extra turn at the end with the dancers speeding up, sending the man hurtling up the set and the woman down.
But in the original instructions, the next figure calls for the exact opposite: the man should move down the set and the woman up.
From Porter's turn-and-a-half, that would be a disastrously sudden change of direction in a dance that flows the way a modern one does, one figure into the next. But it is not necessarily an issue in a historical reconstruction done with proper steps. The step-sequences conclude at the end of the musical strain, so there would not be the same sort of strong momentum and an abrupt change of direction would be less of an issue. But it's not a complete non-issue; aesthetically it's nicer to avoid such sudden reverses. And on top of the very generous amount of music for a figure usually done in half the time (without Porter's extra turn at the end), it makes me a little bit uneasy.
So let's take another look at Dukes' figure. Explained and diagrammed at the end of my earlier post, it is wordily titled "Turn Corners right hand & your partner with your left" in the table of contents. Dukes spells out the directions in his diagram titles as first "Turn corners right hands and your Partner round with the left hand" followed by "Turn the other Corners right hands & yr. Partner left hands half round". There's no indication of how many measures it takes, but it ends with a half-turn only that leaves the active dancers mid-set top and bottom rather than back in the men's and women's lines, setting up for the next figure in Dukes' book, which begins with the active couple in those positions.
Does the figure have to end that way and always be followed by a figure with an unusual starting point? I doubt it. If the following figure were one that started with the active couple neatly in their progressed places, the turn would need to be either a quarter only or one and a quarter, the latter of which fits rather better with four bars of music. And from a left hand (counter-clockwise) turn that leaves the dancers back in their lines, even with a break at the conclusion of the step-sequence, it would flow very naturally for the woman to next move up the set and the man down, without any abrupt change of direction.
That seems like a good solution, but it does involve messing slightly with Dukes' figure and assuming that the right- and left-hand turns are implied even though not specifically spelled out. And that also makes me uneasy; Thompson manuals often say right or left hands when they mean a one-hand turn, though it's hard to tell if they are totally consistent about it or not.
In the 1770s we're about halfway between Dukes' c1752 publication and that of the earliest of the early nineteenth century Regency manuals. When sources are that widely separated, I usually lean toward using the earlier style rather than the later, but in this case it's a very difficult call because of the number of factors to consider:
- the lack of any mention of right and left hands in the directions
- the problem of referencing "future" sources (relative to the figures) for the exclusive two-hand definition of "turn" without knowing when that shift took place
- the close match to Dukes' figure but the problem of the ending position and the lack of specified hands vs. Porter's shortening the third turn and dramatically lengthening the fourth to use up all of the music
- the generous amount of music allowed
- the momentum of the dance and aesthetics of this particular set of figures
How to decide?
Well, there's actually another possibility. The very unusualness of the spelled out sequence of turns and the oddity of having twice the amount of music makes me wonder if we ought to be thinking of this as a unified "turn corners" figure at all. Why not just say "turn corners" if that is what was meant?
The figures could also be read very literally as four separate, complete turns with each corner turn and each partner turn ending with the dancers back in their lines. The active couple would have to exit the second corner turn carefully so as not to slam into each other mid-set on their way back to places, but they would have an attractive moment of passing left shoulders in the center then curving around to their own rights to face each other at the conclusion of a step-sequence before beginning their final two-hand turn. This rather neatly addresses most of the issues above: two-hand turns are used, all the extra music is soaked up, there is no need to modify any figure, and with four measures allowed for one complete partner turn at the end, the figure concludes in good time with no problem with sudden reverses of momentum.
So that's my current choice for this figure: not a "turn corners" sequence at all, but four separate turns.
Original:
B1 Man whole figures at bottom & Wo. at top the same time
B2 then the Wo. hey at bottom & Man at top
Modern:
B1 First man figure-eight through second couple above, passing right shoulder with 2nd woman while first woman does the same with the third couple below, passing third man right shoulder
B2 First couple pass by left in the center and hey for three at other end, skipping, first woman passing second man left shoulder, first man passing third woman left shoulder (6b); first couple lead down center to bottom, third couple end in middle, second on top
And finally we have the last two figures and the progression. As noted above, Porter reversed the instructions in the original dance (man figure-eight down then hey up/woman figure-eight up then hey down), possibly to allow for the hurtling-into-the-figure aspect given by his speeding-up extra two-hand turn. And he added an extra progression at the end to warp it into a three-couple set instead of a normally progressing dance. Simply undo these changes to get back to the original.
Here's the whole thing:
Historical reconstruction
A1 Active couple turns right hands quite round and casts down to second place (second couple moves up)
A2 Active couple turns left hands quite round and casts down to third place (third couple moves up)
B1 Hands six quite round
B2 Active couple leads (near hands) up the middle and casts down to second place (third couple moves down)
A1 Active couple turns right corners two hands quite round to places (4b) and each other two hands quite round to places (4b)
A2 Active couples turns left corners two hands quite round to places (4b) and each other two hands quite round to places (4b)
B1 Man whole figure at bottom/woman whole figure at top
B2 (actives switching ends) Man hey at top/woman hey at bottom
At the end of the sequence the active couple has progressed one place in the normal way and continues on to the bottom of the set, each couple becoming active in turn as they reach the top. There would be "end effects" when dancing only one couple from the bottom, but it's not difficult for experienced dancers to accomodate these.
There are still three things about this sequence that I would consider oddities for the Regency era if defined strictly as the 1810s, since even with a historical reconstruction, the figures are still from three decades earlier: the lengthy turn corners/partners sequence; the casting down to third place followed by the hands six rather than by immediately leading up and casting off to second place and doing hands six from there; and the long lead up itself.
A note on music
It's easy to find a recording of "Fandango"; the modern dance is a popular one. It may be difficult, however, to find one that with the tune played more than six times through (for three iterations of the dance). Live musicians are the solution! I have previously discussed historical progression and how many times through a tune are required for sets of various length; the short version is that since these figures require twice through the tune, the musicians will need to play "Fandango" twelve times for a three-couple set, twenty-four times for a four-couple set, and an additional eight times through for each additional couple. A dance of this length will be a marathon for each active couple if the sets are too long!
And one other thing
The flamenco-like Spanish dance called the fandango? This has nothing to do with it. English country dance, English figures, English style.
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