Stating that Regency-era dancing master Thomas Wilson's personally created new figure, "The Maze", appeared in published country dance figures is a bit of an exaggeration: I've found it exactly twice, once in Thompson's 24 Country Dances For the Year 1814 and once in L'Assemblée, the latter being a book of forty-eight country dance tunes with figures by Wilson which was published in 1819. (The Thompson book also noted prominently on its cover that its figures were by Wilson.)
I can't rule out other appearances of the figure, but after skimming through most of my Wilson sources with no further luck, I'd say that The Maze, like True Lover's Knot (but unlike Double Triangle) qualifies as a genuine rarity. That means that it's not a typical Regency dance figure, the odds of anyone other than Wilson's own students knowing it were fairly low, and one shouldn't call it today unless certain one's set already knows it or prepared to explain or teach it. I'll provide a simple explanation below.
Like Wilson's other new figures, The Maze appeared in at least three of in Wilson's country dance figure books, the earliest of which I've found it in is the 1811 third edition of An Analysis of Country Dancing. It also appears in the fourth edition of Analysis (1822) and in The Complete System of English Country Dancing (c1820). Happily, the diagram shown at left (click to enlarge) is the same in all three sources and the description varies only in the location of the line breaks. This particular image is taken from Complete System.
The instructions given by Wilson are more helpful than those given for Double Triangle, but are still somewhat dependent on the diagram:
The Lady at A crosses over and moves round the second couple, then round the third Lady to a; at the same time the Gentleman at B crosses over and performs the same Figure on the opposite side, and faces his partner at b, which finishes the Figure.
One can get a general idea of the path from that, but the part about going round the second couple and third Lady is not specific enough. How far round? Which direction(s)? And what is also not entirely obvious without being able to see the location of a and b on the diagram is that this is a progressive figure; the active couples moves down one place and the next couple moves up.
The Maze is one of many examples of Wilson making a complicated figure out of a set of simple standard ones by combining them into one extended path. In this case, the figure breaks down into:
- Cross over one couple and cast down one place
- Cross over one couple and cast up one place
- Lead down the middle two couples and cast up one place
Each of those would normally occupy four measures of music, but Wilson gives The Maze only eight measures total. That works out fine, though, if the dancers move briskly; they can just keep flowing through the figure without any stop or jeté-assemblé until the very end. To facilitate this, the second couple should not move up during the first two-thirds of the figure. They should wait until the active dancers have passed completely around them and move up when the active couple goes down the middle.
Note that while the dancers are moving side by side as they lead down the middle, there is no indication of taking hands.
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The two appearances I've found for The Maze are:
(1) for the tune "The Cavendish Waltz" in Thompson's 24 Country Dances For the Year 1814, in which it is part of a simple figure:
Swing with right hands round 2d. Cu: & back the maze & set contrary corners.
There are no strain markers, but there are three eight-bar strains in the music, each repeated, and three figures, which means either eight or sixteen bars of waltz time for The Maze, depending on how reliable one feels the repeat signs are. I lean toward sixteen bars, since it's very common in this era for waltz-time dances to allow double the expected music for each figure.
(2) as a double figure for the tune "La Chasse" in L'Assemblée, a figure which is absolutely stuffed with Wilson's new figures. Here's an image of that figure:
"La Chasse" is in 6/8, and The Maze is given the expected eight bars. This is a six-figure, forty-eight bar dance, and no fewer than five of the six (all but set contrary corners) are Wilson's creations. And in four out of those five, only the active couple moves! The only exception is True Lovers Knot, which is danced here by the second and third couples after the progression, as described in my post on that figure. So for the inactive couples, the dance figure consists of sixteen bars of waiting, eight bars of setting, sixteen more bars of waiting, and -- at last! -- eight bars of movement. I would not call this as a good figure.
With only two samples, one can't draw any conclusions about the typical placement of The Maze within a country dance figure other than that placement can obviously vary.
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