The Princess 1721

The Princess 1721 is an English Country Dance. It was published by Playford (John Young) (website) in 1721 in The Dancing Master, Vol. the first, 17th ed., London. It was interpreted by George Williams in 2020. It is a proper Duple Minor dance. The minor set lasts 32 bars. It is in the key: G minor.

There are two dances called The Princess in Playford (with the same music though). One is found from 1701 to 1716 and the other from 1721 to 1728. The version from 1701 is more commonly danced now-a-days, but this is the other one.

The beginning of B1, where the 1s cross and circle the 2s is very quick. If the dancers need extra time they could omit the following set.

Playford writes
The first Couple lead through the second Couple, then cast up and cast off Then the second Couple do the same Then the first Couple cross over quite round the second Couple into their own Places, and sett and cast off Then Right-hands and Left quite round, and turn your Partner.

The tune, also called The Princess, appeared in Playford with the dance. It was performed by Bare Necessities (Earl Gaddis, Mary Lea, Peter Barnes, and Jacqueline Schwab) on the album By Choice. The music is used with permission from the Country Dance Society, Boston Centre, Inc.

The animation plays at 113 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 dances of George Williams (including interpretations like this one) are licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: CC BY-NC-SA license.

A11-31s lead down below the 2s
4-81s cast up, then cast down to 2nd place as 2s lead up
A21-82s do the same
B11-41s cross, go below 2s, cross again back up to own places
5-61s set
7-81s cast down, 2s lead up
B21-6Starting with neighbor, three changes of rights and lefts
7-8Partner two hand turn half for the fourth change

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=ThePrincess1721

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The dance itself is out of copyright, and is in the public domain. The interpretation is copyright © 2020 by George Williams. And is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 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.