The Female Saylor

La Matelotte

The Female Saylor ~ Roe The Female Saylor

The Female Saylor or La Matelotte is a European Contredanse. It was published by Feuillet in 1706 in Recüeil de Contredanses (Feuillet), Paris. It was interpreted by Pat Shaw (website) in 1960 and published in Six Simple Country Dances. Found in The Playford Ball. It is a proper Duple Minor dance. The minor set lasts 32 bars. It is in the key: G minor.

Feuillet describes his dances with diagrams rather than words and I am not prepared to reproduce them here. If you wish to examine the originals look here on page 121. John Essex translated Feuillet in the book For the Further Improvement of Dancing (page 61) which Walsh published in 1710.

The Playford Ball dates this interpretation from 1965, but that was merely the approximate date of publication of Six Simple Country Dances. Another Look at Playford dates it from 1960.

The tune was published with the dance. It was performed by Bare Necessities (Earl Gaddis, Mary Lea, Peter Barnes, and Jacqueline Schwab) on the album Favorites of the Boston Centre. The music is used with permission from the Country Dance Society, Boston Centre, Inc.

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 (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), 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=TheFemaleSaylor

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The dance itself is out of copyright, and is in the public domain. The interpretation is copyright © 1960 by Pat Shaw. 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
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.