The Festival
The Festival is an English Country Dance. It was published by Longman & Broderip in 1790 in Twenty-Four Country Dances for the year 1790, London. It was interpreted by George Williams in 2022. It is a proper Duple Minor dance. The minor set lasts 32 bars.
Longman & Broderip write:
The 1st. Gent set to the 2d. Lady and hands three round then Lady do the same lead down the middle, up again and cast off and Allemand
The only vexing question is: Whom does M1 circle three with? Presumably W2 is involved, but is the third W1 or M2? Since W1 has her own turn comeing up I presume it is M2.
A slighter niggle is: Which of the many different "Allemand"s do they mean. It needs to fit into 8 bars, while the standard Regency Allemand takes 4. But if you go back with the left, then it fits in 8.
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 dances of George Williams (including interpretations like this one) are licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: CC BY-NC-SA license.
| A1 | 1-4 | M1 set twice to W2 |
| 5-8 | M1+2s circle three | |
| A2 | 1-4 | W1 set twice to M2 |
| 5-8 | W1+2s circle three | |
| B1 | 1-8 | 1s lead down, turn alone, lead back and cast off into 2nd place as the 2s lead up |
| B2 | 1-4 | 1s regency allemande right... |
| 5-8 | ...and back to the left |
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=TheFestival
The dance itself is out of copyright, and is in the public domain. The interpretation is copyright © 2022 by George Williams. And is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. My visualization of this dance is copyright © 2022 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.