The Hamiltonian

Lady Amelia Murray's Choice

The Hamiltonian ~ Duple The Hamiltonian

The Hamiltonian or Lady Amelia Murray's Choice is an American Country Dance. It was devised by Hezekiah Cantelo in 1785 and published in Twenty Four American Country Dances danced by the British during their Winter Quarters at Philadelphia, New York, & Charles Town. It was interpreted by George Williams in 2022. It is a proper Triple Minor dance. The minor set lasts 48 bars.

Cantelo writes:

First Lady foots it with the 2d. Gen: and turns · 1st. Gen: Ditto with the 2d. Lady Gallop down two Couple, up again, and cast off · foot it and go the Allemande round to the right foot it and turn four hands the round to the right with the 3d. couple · Right and Left with the first couple

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.

A11-8W1+M2 foot it (set forward twice) and two hand turn
A21-8M1+W2 foot it and two hand turn
B11-81s give hands, gallop down, come back up, cast down as 2s lead up
B21-41s foot it
5-81s regency allemande right
C11-41s+3s foot it to center
5-81s+3s circle left
C21-82s+1s face partner four changes rights and lefts

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=TheHamiltonian

< Prev Top Next >

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
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.