Bring Me Flowers (5 Couples)

Bring Me Flowers (5 Couples) is an English Country Dance. It was devised by Gary Roodman (website) in 2015 and published in A Sequence of Calculated Figures. It is a 5 Couple Circle dance. It is a mixer. The minor set lasts 32 bars. It is in the key: G major. Someone thought this dance was Intermediate / Hard.

Gary Roodman’s Bring Me Flowers can be danced with either 3 or 5 couples (or 7 if you have very long arms). The difference is not terribly significant; the calls are exactly the same, but I include animations of both versions.

If you start out with a 4 couple set you will not progress and you will not mix partners. Each time through the dance you end up back where you started with the same partner who also ended up where s/he started.

If you have a six couple set (assuming you can do the stars and the orbits on something that big) you will get double progression. You’ll move through 3 of the 6 positions available to you and dance with 3 of the 6 partners. In other words you are better off splitting the set into two three couple sets.

Teaching notes: When doing the "flower petals" it is important that each dancer note the location of the dancer s/he is trading with. Each dancer must move to that spot. There is a strong tendency for the dancers moving out not to go far enough around the circle, they may need to think in terms of going further than they think they need to. may also help if the dancers practice the flower petals by holding hands on the trade. Note that between two "petals" there will be one dancer you "skip" that is you don't interact with. It can also help if at the end of each trade you face the person you don't interact with, this will orient you properly when looking for the next person.

At our practices in Santa Barbara we found we got less confused with 5 couple sets than with 3.

I also have an animation which shows the path each dancer will traverse.

The animation plays at 120 counts per minute normally, but the first time through the set the dance will often be slowed down so people can learn the moves more readily. Men are drawn as rectangles, women as ellipses. Each couple is drawn in its own color, however the border of each dancer indicates what role they currently play so the border color may change each time through the minor set.

The dance contains the following figures: hand turn (allemande), gypsy, circle, hands across, back to back (and probably others).

If you find what you believe to be a mistake in this animation, please leave a comment on youtube explaining what you believe to be wrong. If I agree with you I shall do my best to fix it.

If you wish to link to this animation please see my comments on the perils of youtube. You may freely link to this page, of course, and that should have no problems, but use one of my redirects when linking to the youtube video itself:
https://www.upadouble.info/redirect.php?id=BringMeFlowers5

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The dance is copyright © 2015 by Gary Roodman. My visualization of this dance is copyright © 2018 by George W. Williams V and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This website is copyright © 2021,2022,2023,2024 by George W. Williams V
Creative Commons License My work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Most of the dances have more restrictive licensing, see my notes on copyright, the individual dance pages should mention when some rights are waived.