Thinking in Fives

I spent a lot of time thinking about quintuple-meter (5/4 or 5/8 time) dances earlier this year, though not much of it showed up on Kickery at the time.  Since historical dance description and terminology are not standardized, there's an important distinction to keep in mind for all dances with some association with the number five:

Five steps (or movements) in a dance do not necessarily imply 5/4 or 5/8 time.

This is entirely obvious to anyone who's studied the "fives" in a longitudinal way, but since I suspect that the total number of people who've done that is pretty small (I'm thinking either one or two), let me break it down a bit. 

First, let's flip things around:

Being in 5/4 or 5/8 time does not necessarily imply that there are five steps or movements in a dance.

Yes, really.

Historically, there are four dances done in quintuple meter:

• the Perrot/Cellarius valse à cinq temps (1840s Paris) and its later simplified version
  
  
• the Saracco/Angelina five-step waltz (1840s Paris and America) and its later variations
  
  
• the half and half (1910s America)
  
  
• the five-step (1920s-1940s England and France)

But the meter and the number of steps/movements are completely different things.   For example: 

• The basic step (and most other variations) for the half and half is only three movements.  There is a five-step half and half variation, but it's an oddity in sources for the dance. 
  
  
• The most common pattern for the 1920s five-step is four movements over five beats.  Five-movement variations are no more common than three-movement variations.
  
  
• In the nineteenth century, one could argue that the Perrot/Cellarius valse à cinq temps involves either four movements (if you interpret the final glissade as a simple sweep of the free foot and don't consider that a "movement" per se), five moments (if a sweep counts as a movement), or six (if you interpret the final glissade as slide-close). 
  
  
• Two of the later variations for the Saracco/Angelina five-step waltz (No. 2 and No. 3) actually involve six movements squeezed into five counts.

It seems that, contrary to what one would think, most dancing for quintuple meter does not actually employ five steps or movements to go with the five-beat rhythm!

Now, go back to the original statement:

Five steps (or movements) in a dance do not necessarily imply 5/4 or 5/8 time.

A few examples:

• The Five-Step Schottische squeezes five movements into four beats.
  
  
• The Three-Slide Galop squeezes five movements into three beats.
  
  
• The Five-Step Boston (a.k.a. Five-Step Waltz) stretches five movements over six beats (two bars of 3/4 time).
  
  
• Le Metropole, which has the same sequence as the Five-Step Boston, but jumpier, likewise stretches five movements over six beats.

I could go on.

The underlying concept to understand is that one of the ways they played around with dance steps in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was to either to accelerate or decelerate the steps against the music.  In other words, they added movements or subtracted them.  Dances like the racket and York (and, for that matter, the galop and polka) depend on adding movements.  Subtracting them, also known as hesitating, becomes a standard technique in the late nineteenth century and develops into an entire waltz subgenre (hesitation waltz) in the early twentieth.

Anything that is meant to be danced in quintuple meter will likely say that outright; dancing masters were well aware that this was an unusual meter to dance in, and to a dancer of the nineteenth or early twentieth century, the mere fact of there being five movements would not have automatically suggested quintuple meter.  So either the description will mention that the dance is in quintuple time (or, in the case of the half & half, alternating bars of 3/4 and 2/4 time) or the author will put "5/4" into a corner somewhere, as M. B. Gilbert does in Round Dancing (Maine, 1890):

So if you have a five-step/movement dance, but there's no mention of 5/4 time, don't just assume it.  The odds are very strongly in favor of it actually being a case of either squeezing five steps into fewer beats or stretching five steps over more beats.

Collecting all the dances with five steps or movements would be quite a challenge, since they can be in any meter, and most of them are not helpfully labeled with the word "five".  The focus of my work has been on dances in quintuple meter, regardless of the number of steps.