strathspey@strathspey.org:69481

Anselm Lingnau

Re: FW: FW: small favor: Arthur's Seat 31-32

Feb. 27, 2018, 4:05 a.m. (Message 69481, in reply to message 69480)

Eric wrote:

> The RSCDS should decide to support ALL SC dances as and when that is useful.

It's probably just as well to remember that the whole issue concerns only a 
very limited part of the repertoire, namely dances that are so old that there 
is no “living memory” associated with them. Most of these dances are actually 
RSCDS dances because not many people other than the RSCDS have even bothered 
with dances from old manuscripts (Jack McConachie's “18th-century dances” book 
is a very rare exception).

Today, almost 95% of the published repertoire of Scottish country dances 
consists of “modern” dances, meaning dances that have been written after the 
Society was founded in 1923. For many of these dances, the devisers are still 
around and available to answer questions. For many others, there are people 
around who learned the dance from the deviser and are probably better placed 
to give stipulations as to the deviser's intent than the Society.

The Society, after all, has published only around 1000 dances altogether, 
which is a tiny part of what is out there. However, simply keeping these 
dances in good repair, answering questions, etc. is in fact keeping the 
Society quite busy. Now you're asking it to serve as a clearinghouse for 
another 18000 dances, most of which the good people of MSC, E&T or the 
Technical Advisory Panel are likely to have never heard of, and about which 
any “advice” the Society can give is likely really not any better or worse 
than that which any experienced dance teacher should be able to provide. At 
RSCDS HQ we do not have access to special arcane knowledge or insight that is 
hidden from ordinary dancers and that would enable us to make a better 
judgement than anyone else. We also do not operate ouija boards. On the whole 
it is probably a much more productive use of our time to encourage dancers to 
develop “common sense” that will help them deal with many dances than to try 
to sort out every little ambiguity in every single dance out there one after 
the other.

It should also be mentioned that even if we look only at old dances where 
devisers (or people close to the devisers) cannot be consulted, many 
ambiguities do not create actual problems. For example, the official RSCDS 
version of Seann Triubhas Willichan, on bars 17-24, has 1st couple lead down 
giving right hands, turn right hands, lead up giving right hands, and cast 
off. It is a very common variation to dance down with nearer hands, turn both 
hands, and dance up with nearer hands again. Many people (including myself) 
find this nicer than what the RSCDS book says, but even if the RSCDS book 
didn't specify which hands to use it would be trivial to establish a consensus 
with one's partner on the fly. Many of the dreaded “ambiguities” in older 
dances are like that. But we don't need a committee to tell us what we like, 
and for all we know that was how the dance was originally intended, anyway, 
and the Society just managed to mangle it dreadfully during the 
reconstruction. The Society certainly does not have an exclusive right to 
decide what people enjoy.

> 2.  When dances have different "variants" (often older dances), these are
> often equally "danceable", but it is decidedly disturbing when different
> "variants" coexist;  the dancers in a set may not discover their different
> traditions till in the dance itself.

So what? I wonder what the worst that can happen will be. Do people actually 
collide at speed on a regular basis because they can't agree on which shoulder 
to pass between half diagonal reels of four? My guess is that the vast 
majority of such “mismatches” will be sorted out “dynamically” and at worst 
lead to a good laugh.

Could we please – by way of illustration only – have a few real-life examples 
of descriptions of dances that are actually being danced socially, that are so 
ambiguous that not promulgating and adhering to a common definite third-party 
resolution leads to actual *problems* (as opposed to brief flashes of 
hilarity) on the social dance floor? I've been dancing for more than 25 years 
now and I find it difficult to remember any such situation. (One might think 
of questions like who makes the arches in Postie's Jig or which shoulder to 
pass in Mairi's Wedding, but these are in fact explained quite unambiguously 
in the authors' dance descriptions if people could be bothered to read, so 
these don't count. Actual examples please.)

If you ask the Society to pronounce on what is the “correct” way to do bars X 
to Y of dance Z, you automatically imply – whether you want it or not – that 
not doing it this way is “wrong” or at least inferior, and this will be taken 
out on people who, whether by ignorance or personal preference, adopt the 
“wrong” method – even if that method appears to work equally well. I have on 
many social occasions been booed and hissed by busybodies of the informal 
“dance police” for doing something “wrong” – whether these people were in fact 
correct or not is immaterial, but this attitude poisons the social atmosphere 
and turns people off SCD, which is the very last thing that we want. 
Therefore, as long as we can't eradicate the informal “dance police” (which in 
my book should have a MUCH higher priority than any fixes to individual 
dances), we should not create more opportunities for people to be “wrong” by 
fixing problems that do not in fact desperately need to be fixed. This is 
counterproductive not just because of the right/wrong issue but also because 
there are enough acctual problems that deserve being tackled, and there is 
only so much time available.

Anselm
-- 
Anselm Lingnau, Mainz, Germany ......................... xxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxx.xxx
Liquid tungsten is so hot, if you dropped it into a lava flow, the lava would
freeze the tungsten.       -- Randall Munroe, _Extreme Boating_ (what if? #50)