At our recent Regency Assembly, one of the dancers challenged my call of a “half figure eight” in a country dance, asking why it wasn’t called a “figure four”. Casey, being an experienced dancer, knew exactly why, but he has excellent comic timing, and the comment broke up the room for a moment.
A geekier question would be why I was using the term “half figure eight” rather than the more typical plain “half figure”. That was for added clarity for modern dancers, who may not be as familiar with the nuances of Regency terminology, in which a sentence like “The figure of the dance is a double figure made up of five figures, the first being the figure” makes perfect sense. Since it doesn’t for everyone, let’s figure out all those different usages of “figure”!
Although every Country Dance is composed of a number of individual Figures, which may consist of “set and change sides,” “whole Figure at top,” “lead down the middle, up again,” “allemande,” “lead through the bottom,” “right and left at top,” &c. yet the whole movement united is called the Figure of the Dance.
— Thomas Wilson, in The Complete System of English Country Dancing, London, c1815.
