Ruffs and Rhees
Ruffs and Rhees is an English Country Dance. It was devised by Ignatius Sancho in 1779 and published in Twelve Country Dances for the Year 1779. Set for the Harpsichord. It was interpreted by Garth Notley (website) in about 2015. It is a proper Duple Minor dance. The minor set lasts 24 bars.
Sancho writes:
Change sides back again lead down two Cu. up again and cast off Le Prussett or the first and second Cu. move intirely round each other till they arrive at proper places
The music consists of three 4 bar strains.
The only difficulty is that Sancho provides 4 bars to Change sides, Garth Notley solves this by introducing a turn single left.
Earliest use of the word Poussette in a country dance that I know of.
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 interpretations on the Regency Dance Site are licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: CC BY-NC-SA license.
An online description of the dance may be found here.
| A1 | 1-4 | Cross right with partner and loop left |
| A2 | 1-4 | Again: Cross right and loop left |
| B1+2 | 1-8 | 1s lead down, turn, lead back, and cast down as 2s lead up |
| C1+2 | 1-8 | 1st corner places push, full poussette |
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=RuffsAndRhees
The dance itself is out of copyright, and is in the public domain. The interpretation is copyright © ~2015 by Garth Notley. My visualization of this dance is copyright © 2023 by George W. Williams V and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This website is copyright © 2021-2025 by George W. Williams V
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.