Pell-Mell

Pall-Mall

Pell-Mell or Pall-Mall is an English Country Dance. It was published by John Playford (website) in 1686 in The Dancing Master, 7th ed., London. It was interpreted by Andrew Shaw in 2017 and published in Elephants Stairs. It is a proper Duple Minor dance. The minor set lasts 32 bars.

Playford writes:
First Man cast off and come below the 2. Man, while the 1. Wo. slips down below the 2. Man and come round into the middle, then all four turn S. and the 2. Man and 2. Wo. go back to back, then 1. Man take the 1. Wo. by the Right-hand and turn once round, while the 1. Wo. takes the 2. Man by the Right-hand and turns once round; then the other cu. do the same.
The 1. Man take the 1. Wo. by the Right-hand and turn once round into the 2. cu. Place, then lead up between the 2. Man and 2. Wo. and go half Figure into their own Places again, the other cu. doing the same again.

The tune is Pell Mell first found in Playford's Dancing Master of 1679, and performed by MGM (Mary Lea, Gene Murrow and Margaret Ann Martin) & Reunion (Barbara Greenberg, Daniel Beerbohm and Jonathan Jensen) on the album New Friends.

The animation plays at 111 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), turn single, cast, lead, figure eight, lead and cast, 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=PallMall

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The dance itself is out of copyright, and is in the public domain. The interpretation is copyright © 2017 by Andrew Shaw. My visualization of this dance is copyright © 2021 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.