New Whitehall

New Whitehall is an English Country Dance. It was published by Henry Playford (website) in 1701 in The Dancing Master, 11th ed., London. It was interpreted by Scott Pfitzinger (website) in about 2019. It is a proper Duple Minor dance. The minor set lasts 24 bars.

Playford writes:

The 1. cu. go the Figure through the 2. cu The 2. cu. do the same The 1. man goes round the 2. man till he comes into his own place, the the 2. wo. does the same round the 1. wo. at the same time, the 1. cu. goes the Figure through the 2. cu. And hands half round and go the single Figure through the 2. cu.

Playford seems pretty clear. He has left out some marks, and he uses "the Figure" where we'd say "half figure eight".

The only thing that worries me is the C part. Playford provides figures which take up 6 bars for something he has marked as taking 4 bars (the dance ends in a rather than a ). I think it is most likely that the C music is also played twice and the hands half round should fill up a whole 4 bar tune. Which in turn means there should be some sort of balance either before or after the half circle.

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: circle, figure eight (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=NewWhitehall

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The dance itself is out of copyright, and is in the public domain. The interpretation is copyright © ~2019 by Scott Pfitzinger. And is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: CC BY-NC-SA license. My visualization of this dance is copyright © 2022 by George W. Williams V and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: CC BY-NC-SA 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.