Class 3 term 1

Another excellent evening.

• (Contentezza d'Amore, Marchesana, La figlia di guglielmino - Katherine's personal practice)
• Heart's Ease
• Marchesana
• Colonesse
• Barcellonne
• Night Peece
• Passamezzo

This term, I'm taking a few minutes before the class to do a little practice with just for me (and my partner): it's my opportunity to focus on my own dancing, rather than on teaching. Those dances are in brackets at the top of the list.

Heart's Ease and Night Peece

I've decided to keep including a smattering of early English Country Dancing. We generally reconstruct these on the fly in class, and tonight was no exception.

We noticed that in Heart's Ease, the text only explicitly has the men moving in the first part of the chorus, and all in the second part. I'm not committed to that as a reconstruction, but it was a rather charming variation to the way it's commonly done. Next step: check any other sources.

Night Peece has a fair bit of ambiguity in exactly who does what when, and what the path is. At some point, I'll write our version up.

Marchesana

As last week: definitely working well. The sense of "group percussion" in the frappamenti is quite a bit of fun. Domenico's version is more interesting by far than the later version.

Colonesse

Nicely polished once more. Focus this week on clean, bouyant, lively saltarelli ... and how to get that effect in slowish music, without necessarily jumping high, or at all.

Barcellonne

Our French Basse Danse in coming on nicely. Next: Danse de Cleves, and then Alenchon.

Passamezzo (Il Ballarino)

Refreshed:

• woman's/plain passeggio
• man's passeggio
• woman's first mutanza
• woman's second mutanza
• man's third mutanza

Then danced a passamezzo, of four mutanze each, using whatever selection of those above we pleased, or improvising mutanze freely. Success!

Finally, we revised the man's first mutanza. This one is significantly harder, but it's coming along nicely.

Next: the passeggii danced together in the middle and at the end; study and practice improvising simple mutanze.