Tuesday Afternoons — Maidstone

Saturday Evenings — Ashford

Dance Index

Dance Index:

Dances from English Dance & Song

English Dance & Song and its predecessor, E.F.D.S. News, are published by the English Folk Dance & Song Society.

These pages are reproduced with kind permission of the English Folk Dance & Song Society. The dances were submitted to the magazine so as to reach as wide an audience as possible. Publishing them here will help to further that aim.

I have done my best to seek permission from any other relevant copyright holders and they are acknowledged where appropriate. If you are a copyright holder and are concerned that content for which you have not given permission is displayed, then please contact me, You must enable JavaScript to see this e-mail address. , so that I may either acknowledge you or remove the content as requested.

If you can provide any more information about any of these dances, their composers, their style, their tempo or their history, then please contact me, You must enable JavaScript to see this e-mail address. , so that I can add that information here.

Thanks to Chris Turner for lending me the old copies of ED&S.

For each dance I provide both the original page from the magazine and my own interpretation of the dance. Words such as "Balance", "Allemande" and "Swing" have been used by different dancing masters to mean many different things. I use Allemande to be the same as Hand Turn or Arm Turn. Styles, tempos and nomenclature vary depending on the century, the country, the dance genre and countless other factors. I have tried to put the dances into words that I use when I am calling today, and to provide other hints where possible, often using other sources. Of course you are welcome to interpret the dances any way you wish. I hope you have fun calling and dancing some of them.

The Articles

• Dances Mentioned By Thomas Hardy in Under the Greenwood Tree.
• Dancing Sidmouth Review of Sidmouth 1955.
• The "Drops and Raises" in Folk Music by Peter Kennedy in 1949.
• Films from the Past Video of Cecil Sharp dancing circa 1912, plus lots of background information on the creation of the video.
• Jubilee Dance Competition in 1961.
• Meeting Country Dances by Roy Dommett in 1982.
• Ralph Page.
• Some Dorset Reel-Steps.
• The Traditional Social Dance in Northumberland by Grahame Binless and Mike Robson in 1970.
• Village Dance in Cumberland in 1939.
• What do we know about our Dances by J.F. and T.M. Flett in 1966.
• What Makes a Good Dance? by Colin Hume plus the 1986 Dance Search Competition.
• Whose Version is That? Part I Colin Hume looks at the problems of interpreting Playford Dances from the original books.
• Whose Version is That? Part II Colin Hume looks at the problems of interpreting Playford Dances from the original books.

The Dances