The French Ambassador ~ Duple

French Embassader ~ Duple

The French Ambassador ~ Bolton The French Ambassador ~ Duple The French Ambassador ~ Williams

The French Ambassador ~ Duple or French Embassader ~ Duple is an English Country Dance. It was published by Henry Playford (website) in 1701 in The Dancing Master, 11th ed., London. It was interpreted by George Williams in 2021. It is a proper Duple Minor dance. The minor set lasts 32 bars.

Playford titled the dance in two ways: "French Embassader" and "The French Embassader"

Playford writes:

The 1. cu. cross over and turn below the 2. cu. Then cross over below the third cu. and turn The 1. man turns the 3. wo. and the 1. wo. the 2. man, then turn your Partner with your left-hand, then lead thorow the 3. cu. and cast up and turn, Figure thorow the 2. cu. and turn your Partner.

The first thing I note is that there is no indication of a second B part. Scott Pfitzinger's interpretation has a second B and stretches the figures out (4 bars for a turn half) to make them fit. I shall take Playford at his word here.

The next oddity is that the 1st man turns the 3rd woman, but the 1st woman turns the 2nd man. It seems much more likely that they both turn 3s.

The start of the B section: "The 1. man turns the 3. wo. and the 1. wo. the 2. man then...", I read the "and" (as opposed to "then") here as suggesting that the 1s should turn simultaneously rather than sequentially. Now we've already decided there is one misprint here, I suggest there are two and that the ones turn the same sex 3. (this also solves the problem of how to get the 3s back to proper, they never become improper)

Another posibility is to have the 3s become improper during A, this breaks the symmetry of the two A parts though.

Note: the 2s+3s are never active together, so this can be compressed into a duple minor dance.

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.
An online description of the dance may be found here.

A11-41s cross, go below, 2s lead up
5-8All two hand turn
A21-41s cross left, go below next 2s, who cross left and lead up
5-8All two hand turn counter clockwise
B1-2M1+W3, W1+M3 right turn half
3-41s left hand turn half
5-81s lead down between next couple and cast back
9-10All two hand turn half
11-141s cross up, 2s cast down, half double figure eight
15-16All two hand turn half

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=TheFrenchAmbassador-Duple

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The dance itself is out of copyright, and is in the public domain. The interpretation is copyright © 2021 by George Williams. And is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 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.