The Mad Dog

The Mad Dog is an English Country Dance. It was devised by Thomas Wilson in 1818 and published in Le Sylphe, London. It is a proper Duple Minor dance. The minor set lasts 16 bars.

Wilson writes:

SINGLE FIGURE
Whole figure at top lead down the middle up again & half poussette with top Cu: .
DOUBLE FIGURE
Set & half right & left with the 2d. Cu: set & back again cross over 2 Cu: cross up one Cu: half figure round the top Cu: & lead outsides

(published by Brutton and Whitaker)

Wilson usually gives multiple figures for a dance name, often one for 16 bars and one for 32, which he calls SINGLE and DOUBLE. This is the SINGLE figure.

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.

An online description of the dance may be found here.

A1-81s full figure eight down around the 2s
B1-41s, lead down, turn, lead back
5-8Half poussette, 1st corners push

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=TheMadDog

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The dance itself is out of copyright, and is in the public domain. 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.