The Belle of Amherst is an English Country Dance. It was devised by Gary Roodman (website) in 2008 and published in Odd Calculated Figures. It is a 3 Couple Longways dance with the 2s improper. In this dance the men are permuted by: 312 and the women by: 231. It is a mixer. The minor set lasts 36 bars. It is in the key: C major. Someone thought this dance was Intermediate.
The tune, called Sophia was published in Musicalischer Tugendtspiegel by Erasmus Widmann in 1631. It was performed by Bare Necessities (Earl Gaddis, Mary Lea, Peter Barnes, and Jacqueline Schwab) on the album Fast Friends. A copy of the album was given to me by Mr. Roodman and is used with his permission.
The animation plays at 91 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, circle, 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=TheBelleOfAmherst
The dance is copyright © 2008 by Gary Roodman. My visualization of this dance is copyright © 2020 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
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.