The Romp

The Romp is an English Country Dance. It was published by Thompson in 1787 in Twenty Four Country Dances for the Year 1787. It was interpreted by Ken Sheffield (website) in 1995 and published in From Two Barns, Vol 7. It is a proper Triple Minor dance. The minor set lasts 32 bars.

I am unable to find the original source for this dance. (Wright published a dance of this name in 1740, but the figure in that dance bears no relation to this one.)

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 Ken Sheffield (including this one) are licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: CC BY-NC-SA license by the CDSS Online Library.
An online description of the dance may be found here.

A11-8Men take hands set left and right, M1 leads them round the women back to places
A21-8Women take hands set right and left, W1 leads them round the men back to places
B11-21s+2s right hands across half
3-41s+3s left hands across half
5-62s+3s right hands across half
7-81s lead up (to 2nd place), 2s cast down, 3s turn single left
B21-2On the right diagonal change by right (within minor set)
3-4On the left diagonal change by left (within minor set)
5-6On the right diagonal change by right (within minor set)
7-8Turn single 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.

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The dance itself is out of copyright, and is in the public domain. The interpretation is copyright © 1995 by Ken Sheffield. And is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: CC BY-NC-SA license. My visualization of this dance is copyright © 2022 by George W. Williams V and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: CC BY-NC-SA license.

This website is copyright © 2021,2022,2023 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.