Teaching the hey for three

I didn't realize my way of teaching heys for three was particularly unusual until one of my regular musicians, who is himself a contra dance caller, commented on it, impressed by how quickly I was able to get a roomful of dancers at a public ball (meaning dancers of wildly mixed ability and experience) doing heys in unison.  Since heys of one sort or another are especially popular in early nineteenth century dance, I teach them frequently and prefer not to take too much time about it, especially when calling at a ball. 

My little trick for teaching a hey for three is to start by teaching it from an L-shaped formation, as a "corner hey", rather than in a straight line.  I find that it can be difficult for dancers, especially beginners, to visualize the figure-eight path of the hey when they all start in a straight line, and that it is not intuitively obvious in which direction the second and third dancers move when everyone starts at once (as they should!) rather than one dancer moving and the other two waiting out a measure or two before starting.  

Doing a corner hey simplifies things.

The dancers start off in a formation like this:

B        A

C

Dancer A moves forward between B and C, turning to the left around C.  B and C both start moving forward toward dancer A and then curve into their paths.  I think of the hey as a series of "go betweens":

A goes between B & C
C goes between A & B
B goes between C & A
A goes between B & C
C goes between A & B
B goes between C & A and everyone is back to places

One key thing to point out is that no dancer ever follows another closely; someone is always cutting between them.  

I avoid saying anything about passing left and right shoulders, because the minute you say those words, people conceive of it as alternating shoulders, and that does not work.  The dancers pass the same shoulder twice at the each end of the hey.  I discourage dancers from even thinking about right and left shoulders, and just emphasize constantly going between the other two dancers in their formation and then curving around.  The figure-eight path usually becomes obvious as the dancers move, particularly if I have them just keep going round and round the hey, but if they don't see it and need help with which way to turn on the ends of the hey, I point it out.

The corner formation is not just a teaching trick.  It's a common way to do a hey in Swedish Dances (country dances for trios-facing-trios), which is where I developed the "go between" method of explaining it.  It is also integral to the first two figures of the "Country Bumpkin" reel for nine.  The same formation occurs now and then in regular country dances, most famously (nowadays) in some figures set to the tune "Fandango" in 1774, when the active couple, from the center, splits and does heys with the other two couples, the woman with the bottom couple and the man with the top couple, creating two corner heys, rather like a Swedish Dance rotated ninety degrees.  There are also figures in which the active couple, one by one, heys with their partner and the next person of the opposite gender, once again creating the corner setup, and the famous sixteen-bar "crossover mirror heys", more properly known as "hey contrary sides and hey your own sides", in which the active dancers both cross the set and -- wait for it -- go between the two dancers of the opposite gender to hey on that side before crossing back and -- you guessed it -- going between -- the other two dancers of their own gender.

Once the hey in the corner formation is mastered, the hey contrary sides and hey your own sides figure is fairly easy, since the crossover at the beginning of each hey makes it work like a corner hey.  After that, a straight-line hey can be introduced just by shifting the "A" dancer up to the top:

A

B

C

All the dancers must adjust their paths slightly so that A can curve around between B and C as the latter two move to briefly bracket A.

I hope this technique proves useful to others teaching heys.

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An interesting little footnote: 

I can't remember exactly when I evolved this way of teaching heys, but it was probably sometime around 2006, when I started teaching Swedish Dances regularly at Regency-era balls and developed a favorite dance figure that involved corner heys.  That was when I started using heys in that formation more often than in the usual straight-line version.

What I did not realize until it was pointed out to me just a few months ago by my Russian colleague Rostislav Kondratenko was that I probably got the idea not from anything I'd researched or experienced in country dancing, or through any particular cleverness of my own, but from the sixteenth-century Italian repertoire.  Specifically, my explanation is a loose English translation of the opening instructions for the catena (chain; one of the many Italian terms for a hey) in the dance Spagnoletta Nuova, published in Fabritio Caroso's Il Ballarino (1581).  The dance is for one gentleman and two ladies in a triangle formation that has the same effect as a corner setup.  Here's the original Italian:

Nel terzo tempo, se sono un' Huomo, & due Dame, l'Huomo principiarà à far la catena, ò intrecciata che vogliano dirle, passando in mezo d'esse, et voltarà alla sinistra di quella Dama che le starà alla sinistra; poi tornarà à passar', & voltarà alla destra; il medesimo faranno le Dame che si trouaranno alla sinistra; & alla destra, & faranno sei Seguiti spezzati, al fine de' quali, (che ogn'vno farà tornato al suo luogo) faranno due Passi presti innanzi, & la Cadenza...   [Source: third paragraph here]

and my loose translation:

In the third movement of the dance, if there are one man and two ladies, the man begins to do the chain, or braid, as they like to say it, passing between [the ladies], and turning to the left of the lady who is standing on the left; then [he] returns to pass and turn to the right; the same is done by the ladies found on the left and right, and [they all] do six Seguiti spezzati, at the end of which (when each one will have returned to their place) [they] do two Passi presti forward and the Cadenza...

The important words are "passando in mezo d'esse": literally, "passing in the middle of them".  More colloquially...passing between.

I danced Spagnoletta Nuova a number of times back in the late 1990s-early 2000s, and I also reconstructed it and taught it to others.  I'd mostly stopped doing 16th-century dance after 2003, but I was working on reconstructions from Il Ballarino through mid-2006 and may well have worked on Spagnoletta Nuova than.  Caroso's instructions apparently descended to my subconscious and stayed lurking there until I was faced with a similar situation in the Swedish Dances and managed to reinvent the wheel.  When I demonstrated my way of teaching a hey for three to Rostik back in March, he immediately pointed out the similarity.

Comments

[Sorcy/Kat]

I use your method of teaching reels whenever I can, because it is amazingly simple and effective. I remember being astonished a few years into Scottish coming to one of your Balticon events and realizing that you had the entire room doing the right thing in about a minute and a half.

So yay! I am glad to see a post on it. I agree that it's unusual, but I really don't think it should be!

~Sor

[Ann Hinchliffe]

Excellent idea which I shall use in my next, lock-down-end, dance classes. Thanks.
A comparable example: Teaching what's often called Grimstock hey, I use Mr Playford's own explanation (once I can prevent my more experienced dancers *calling* it a hey!) which as you know says 'The first couple go between the second' (etc), no hey mentioned at all. Half-way to your method, really.
And yes, I avoid mention of Right and Left even when used correctly for the hey. My partner and others I've danced with tend to panic when Those Words are used: some perfectly intelligent people find them a rather scary foreign language.