Halcyon Days

Halcyon Days is a New England Contra Dance. It was devised by Joseph Pimentel (website) in 2020 and published in The Green Jay Collection. It is an improper duple minor longways dance. The minor set lasts 32 bars. It is in the key: A major. Someone thought this dance was Intermediate.

First devised in 2015, this version from 2020.

Start with the 2s in the center of a line of four facing down. Pimentel suggests lining up in a normal improper formation and then doing a neighbor swing into a line of four to get in position.

This is a medley of two tunes. The first, Amis Martins-Pecheurs, was composed by Dave Wiesler, and the second, La Brunette e La, is a Québécquois folk song. It was performed by Goldcrest (Daron Douglas, Paul Oorts and Dave Wiesler) on the album the Green Jay Collection. The music is used with permission from the Joseph Pimentel and Goldcrest. The album may be purchased either at the CDSS online store or at Bandcamp.

The animation plays at 113 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 (no music plays during this slow set). 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, bend the line, swing (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=HalcyonDays

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The dance is copyright © 2020 by Joseph Pimentel. My visualization of this dance is copyright © 2024 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.