There seems to be a mistaken impression that because setting your own figures is permitted in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century ("Regency") English country dancing, it must be required, and people who want to dance authentically need to stop using their favorite tunes and give up all their favorite figures in favor of learning to make them up on the spot.
That's not actually true. Assuming you have good reconstructions, which admittedly is a rather large assumption given how many dreadful (in a historical sense) ones are floating around, it's perfectly possible to keep right on doing the same figures to the same tunes forever and be historically correct. It's boring, and it's not displaying high-level ballroom skills for a dancer of the era (if you can consider "able to choose a different tune now and then" a suitable bar to clear to have "high-level ballroom skills"; it seems like a pretty low bar to me), but not incorrect.
What has to change is not what you do, but how you do it and how you think about it.
Incorrect: "This dance is called [name]. Its figures are [figures]"
Correct: "Here are the figures: [figures]. We're going to dance them to the tune [name]."
See what I did there? You can do exactly the same figures to exactly the same tune. Just...say it differently. Think about it differently. Understand the difference between a tune (music; the thing with a name) and dance figures (a selection from a limited repertoire of "glossary figures" put together in mostly-predictable ways).
And when you internalize that mindset rather than the modern one, the varied world of historical Regency dancing opens up to you.
If you then want to move on to a higher level of accuracy, there are two possibilities to pursue: changing the tunes or changing the figures. Eventually, perhaps you'll do both!
Everything below presumes you are a dance organizer or dance caller or otherwise have some influence over what your community of dancers does. If you don't, the first step is to gain that influence, or you'll never be able to apply the rest of this post. You need to be in a position to select what gets danced to make this work.
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Let's take the easy step first: change your tunes. It's really quite simple.
Keep your dance figures, the ones you like so much.
Determine how many bars of music they require. Thirty-two bars is typical, with two eight-bar musical strains played AABB, but there are other possibilities. Forty-eight bars (three strains AABBCC) is quite common. There are shorter figures as well (twenty-four, or even sixteen bars) and occasionally longer ones.
Pick out some period tunes that are in the repertoire of your musicians (or from a period source, if your musicians are comfortable with learning new music for your event) or your collection of dance recordings and can be played at the same length.
Next time you are in charge of a dance, tell the musicians to play a different tune. And then have people do those same figures to it. Explain it as in the "Correct" example above.
There, that wasn't so hard, was it? American contra dancers do this by default. The caller selects the figures, the musicians select the tune, and a random pairing results. So you can be confident that people really can manage to dance without going by music-memory. They just have to be willing to do it.
Of course, some annoying person is going to say "isn't that dance [name]?" or "how come we're doing [name] to the wrong music?" Maybe there will be several annoying persons, the ones who have all firmly internalized the modern mindset that figures and tunes must be married to each other and that it is some kind of sacrilege to part them. That it is inauthentic. People like that have it exactly backward. This is annoying, but very common.
Your pre-rehearsed reply to such complaints is going to be something along the lines of "It's so much fun to use all these wonderful other tunes! Isn't variety great? They loved new dance tunes in the Regency era!"
Judging by the thousands of dance tunes published during the extended Regency period, that's a historically accurate sentiment. People had an appetite for new tunes. Wouldn't you, after a few decades? (I realize that some people can happily do the same thing once or twice a week to the same sixteen bars of music, over and over and over, forever. I am not one of those people.)
Remember to accompany your reply with a dazzling smile, and make sure the tune you pick is actually wonderful. There were plenty of mediocre dance tunes churned out by music publishers responding to public demand, and there's really no need to resurrect those. And save yourself a whole new set of complaints by not choosing a tune which is already popularly attached to different figures.
If people keep complaining, keep smiling and keep burbling about variety. And pick really good tunes. Eventually, they will be convinced by the good music, or at least decide it's not worth complaining repeatedly to someone who blithely refuses to comprehend why anyone would be upset by new music.
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Once you are comfortable casually mixing up your music, it's time to move on to setting figures.
At a basic level, that isn't much harder. It just reverses the process above.
Pick out a favorite tune, preferably one that everyone has not already memorized a particular set of figures to. Think about some figures you like that are a length that tune can be structured to match. Again, thirty-two bar sets of figures and thirty-two bar musical structures are the most common.
Next time you organize a dance event, tell the musicians to play that favorite tune and then tell people the figures they are going to dance to it. Someone is inevitably going to ask, "what's the name of this dance?" The pre-rehearsed reply for this is "the tune is called [name]", which is accurate but doesn't immediately divert you into an annoying debate.
The next time you dance, use the same tune but set different figures to it, and rehearse a reply expanded along the lines of "it was a popular tune, so people back then liked to use it for different dance figures, and I think that's great!" Remember to be cheerful rather than lecturing (or hectoring) in tone. You love this; everyone else should too!
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Now, to the meat of things: where do you get all these dance figures?
There are several different approaches:
- You can use the figures published below the piece of music.
- You can use some other published figures.
- You can modify a set of figures slightly by swapping out one or two figures
- You can pick out a favorite set of figures and use that combination all the time.
- You can compose your own figures.
As noted above, always doing the first is not wrong. It's just...kind of boring. I'm sure there were boring people in Regency ballrooms, but I see no good reason to try to embody one myself.
The second option saves you the effort of composing figures. Just make sure the lengths match and you're fine. Regency dancing master G. M. S. Chivers organized the dance figures by length in his published manuals to make it easier to swap them around to different tunes than the ones he named for them. He said this explicitly in The Modern Dancing Master (1822):
The Figures are so arranged, that any New Tune, or one particularly wished to be danced that is not in the collection, can be easily selected, observing that the tune contains the same number of bars as the Figure requires. (p. 41)
The third option is getting a little bit more advanced. But small alterations are not too difficult. Maybe your chosen figures include "hands four round and back". Try something like changing that to "right hands across, left hands back". If they include "promenade of three couples", switch it with "cast off three couples". You may accidentally create some combinations that are awkward or boring. That puts your figures in good company; plenty of published figures were awkward or boring as well. Only rarely did publishers hire someone really creative to come up with dance figures for their music books.
If your dancers have good memories, you will probably draw comments like "oh, this is just like [name], but with a different beginning/ending/middle." You need do nothing but agree. Yes, yes it is quite like. Fancy that!
Number four drifts into "boring" territory again, but it works if you don't do it for entire balls. If you're calling dances for entire evenings or lengthy workshops, you'd better memorize multiple favorite combinations. Regular dancers notice these things.
Number five is the highest level of skill, and it takes some practice to be able to do it live, so I would recommend working out your figure combinations in advance when first starting out. Regency dancing master Thomas Wilson provided pages and pages of charts to use for this, which I do not find helpful, and pages and pages of explanations, which I do. It's not really all that difficult. But to do it well requires enough immersion in typical combinations of dance figures to work out the "rules" for creating such combinations. They aren't quite as fixed as Wilson makes them out to be, but they do exist. And to apply them on the spot and come up with an attractive combination requires developed instincts and good ability to visualize. And that requires a lot of practice. And, at some point, another post from me to explain it.
Fortunately, there's no hurry. So few people can do this that no one will expect it of you. Once you get good at it, you can surprise them with your prowess!
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Now, what if your dancers are completely resistant to the idea of ever mixing things up? The complaints are bitter and constant, and you just don't want to deal with them, because you do this for fun and don't like being annoyed all the time. But you also want to be as accurate as possible.
There's a solution to this.
In the long run (later in the nineteenth century), dances and tunes started getting stuck together more firmly. But there was a small group of tunes for which that process seems to have happened earlier. Wilson lists a few tunes which have only a single traditional figure. This indicates that the concept of a fixed figure for a tune was developing by the Regency era. It just wasn't the default. But if you really want to never, ever mix up tunes and dances, sticking with that small set of them will at least put you firmly within historical practice.
Here's Wilson on the topic, under the tune "Village Maid" (p. 93) in A Companion to the Ballroom (c1816):
To this tune as is likewise the case with the "Downfall of Paris" "Scotch Contention"__"Rural Felicity or Haste to the Wedding" &c. but one particular figure is danced, I have given the original Only as a New figure to these tunes however correct would be dancers in general be considered wrong and never used.
I would also add "The Triumph", which has a particular characteristic figure (the "lead up in triumph"), though Wilson does give two different figures for it and notes that both were danced.
Note that Wilson listing off tunes for which only one "particular figure" was danced strongly implies that that was not the case for most tunes. Sometimes what is not said is as important as what is.
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I call figures without either fixed choreographies or fixed tunes regularly, and after many years of doing so, I suspect I have more practical experience at working this way than anyone else in the world. So how does all of this shake out in actual practice?
If I don't have a specific goal in mind for a class, my calling habits will be split between three different approaches:
- Calling a particular set of figures that I like to pair with a traditional tune. I have one set I use so often for "Money Musk" that many of my regular dancers have it memorized.
- Calling a favorite set of figures to whatever tune happens to be playing. I have a few tried-and-true combinations of figures that I call over and over again.
- Composing figures on the fly. I like to keep my skills sharp, so in a general Regency country dance workshop with no specific focus, I often won't plan the figures. I'll just compose them on the spot. I even do this sometimes at balls or other events, if I end up with spare time and not enough planned dances.
I didn't deliberately plan this trio of approaches, but I suspect that that mix and level of skill is a reasonable approximation of what a very experienced dancer of the era could do. Regular experience is how it happened to me, after all.
If you want to get to that point too, go back to the top of this post and start working through it. Let me know if you have questions. And good luck!
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