Named Formations in the Manual

Anselm Lingnau

Message 57480 · 1 Dec 2009 11:10:46 · Fixed-width font · Whole thread

Andrew Smith wrote:

> That is the only one in the RSCDS "Index to Formations and Movements in
> Scottish Country Dances", 2nd edition, published in 2006.

and Sophie Rickebusch said:

> In strathspey time, there's "The Wishing Well" from book 44, also
> devised by Minnie Baenninger.

The formation in »The Wishing Well« is similar to the one in »A Castle In The
Air« but not identical. The main difference stems from the fact that the
version in »The Wishing Well«, that dance being a strathspey, does not involve
balancing in line (one turns the other person instead). The Manual, in section
6.29, calls »The Spiral« »a method of progression in reel and jig time«. There
is no mention of a strathspey version of the formation, and the connection may
have slipped by the Manual authors/revisers, who one hopes would have been
aware of Book 44 (which came out in 2004, i.e., before the most recent edition
of the Manual), possibly because the similarity between bars 1-8 of »The
Wishing Well« and bars 25-32 of »A Castle In The Air« is not made explicit in
the description of the former dance. (In other words, something like »1st and
2nd couples dance The Spiral in strathspey time as follows: ...« would have
helped make the connection between the two.)

A propos of nothing, recently I helped a few people from my group prep for
Unit 1, one of whose prerequisites as per the Syllabus is knowing all the
named formations from the current Manual, including »The Spiral«. Perhaps the
fact that I took my own Teacher's Certificate exams way back in 2000 may
excuse me for thinking, at that moment, »The WHAT?« But at least the thing has
two dances to its name, sort of -- albeit by the same author --, which is more
than can be said for »En Rond« (which is in the Manual, too) or »The
Serpentine« (which isn't).

I don't know who gets to decide which particular named formation makes it into
the Manual, and hence into the Unit 1 curriculum. However I don't think there
is a compelling necessity for every candidate to have to learn formations by
rote that (a) only occur in a small handful of dances to begin with and (b)
are explained in excruciating detail in the individual descriptions of those
dances, anyway. The amount of rote learning required for Unit 1 is
extraordinary already (Three famous 18th century fiddle composers, anyone?
Three 20th century accordion players? (And make sure you hit the correct
ones.) The name, author, and year of the first collection of Scottish dances
actually published in Scotland??) and I wonder what happened to the idea of
posing exam questions that would actually require candidates to *think*. But
of course it is probably more important for a budding teacher to be able to
accurately reproduce from memory the number of setting steps in »The Swirl« (1
dance in the RSCDS repertoire, and for the record, the answer is »zero«). And
similarly of course we do *not* want to encourage in our teacher candidates
new-fangled vices like »thinking« ...

Anselm
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