Since I frequently have to deal with an imbalance in numbers between the ladies and the gentlemen at nineteenth century balls, I'm always interested in dances that use a trio formation. This can be one gentleman with two ladies or vice-versa, though the former is the more common situation.
This dance, simply called "The Trio", appears in at least two editions of Elias Howe's American dancing master, and ball-room prompter (Boston, 1862 and 1866). Howe's instructions are a bit vague and neglect to mention the actual timing of the figures, but a little experimentation convinced me that the following reconstruction is workable and fun. This is an extremely easy dance, good for groups of beginners.
The formation is a long line of trios of either sort. The ideal is that all the trios should have the same makeup, though it doesn't make any particular difference in the dance itself.
At the beginning of the dance, the dancers in the center column face down the room while the outside dancers face up.
4b Trios take hands in a wavy line and balance forward and back twice
(outside dancers cross free hands to make a circle of three)
4b Trios circle once round to the left and open back into wavy line
8b Repeat all of the above, ending in original places
4b Outside columns of dancers cast off to the bottom of the set while the middle dancers march toward the bottom dancer, coming "close together" and all turning to face up the set
4b Middle dancers wait while outside dancers turn and come up to take hands in original trios
4b Entire set marches up the room in the original order, opening up space between trios
4b Top two outside dancers march down between the lines to join the bottom dancer; all other outside dancers move up one row and center dancers face down the set
The "wavy line" formation has the center dancer taking right hands with the person on his or her right and left hands with the person on the left, like this:
/c\
\o/ \o/
They don't need to specifically break the circle at the end of the first sixteen bars; just let the casting off flow from the circle formation as the outside dancers drop crossed hands.
Note that the middle dancers never progress or otherwise change their order in the set. The bottom dancer also needs to hold his or her place while the other middle dancers march down so that the middle dancers end up "close together" as prescribed by Howe.
Depending on the length of the set, the two dancers moving to the bottom may need to use a galop rather than simply marching down.
The dance continues until the outside dancers return to their original trios, at which point each trio interlaces their arms around each others' waists and promenades around the room.
There is no specific music for this dance; any thirty-two bar country dance tune in duple time will do. It needs to be played through as many times as there are trios, plus a bit extra for promenading.
There is no theoretical limit on the number of trios in the set, but if the dance is to fit into thirty-two bars, the practical limit is 8-12 couples, depending on how fast the dancers can move. The casting off and rejoining partners, who are in a "compressed" line at the bottom of the set, must fit into eight bars of music.
Reconstruction notes
As noted above, Howe's instructions are somewhat vague, so I've made three specific decisions for this reconstruction:
1. The balancing and circling at the beginning. The original instructions are ambiguous: "All balance three in hand; hands three round. Balance again and hands round." I've chosen to interpret "in hand" as a wavy line at the beginning and to have the dancers balance forward and back because I find right and left less pleasing right before circling. The casting off of the outside dancers flows very nicely from this arrangement of the hands. I've kept both circles going to the left because Howe doesn't say "hands back" or anything else to indicate a change of direction and made them full circles because circling halfway is just too little movement for four bars of music.
2. The original instructions have the casting up of the outside dancers/compression of the center dancers and the coming back up to original positions all done in eight bars. That's quite doable if the set is short enough, but it leaves an entire eight bars for the two top dancers to move toward the bottom, which is ridiculous unless you have a very long set. Since having the set be both short enough for the cast-and-come-up to work in eight bars and long enough to allow the move down to occupy eight bars is impossible, and since I really don't like the idea of a twenty-eight-bar dance, I've moved the coming up again into the final eight bars. This is the pattern my dancers and I kept falling into instinctively when dance-testing. The other option would be to decouple dance and musical phrase, with very long sets and the cast-and-come-up and move down simply taking as long as they take. This is a less musical and a lot more hassle for musicians and callers -- the figures won't ever end exactly on the phrase of the music.
3. Howe never actually calls for the center dancers to ever face up the set, but I just can't stand having the poor center dancer at the bottom face the wall throughout! Turning up while the outside dancers come up the set and then down while the top two outside dancers march down also gives the center dancers a bit more to do.
Many thanks to Tracy, Jen, Laurie, Crane, Ana, Vicki, Bob, and Sarah for dance-testing help!
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