The Rose
The Rose is an English Country Dance. It was published by Thompson in 1778 in Twenty four Country Dances for the year 1778. It was interpreted by George Williams in 2025 and published in Colin Hume's Website. It is a proper Duple Minor dance. The minor set lasts 16 bars.
Thompson writes:
Right hands across left hands back again lead down two Cu: up again and cast off
This is another dance Colin does not provide a full interpretation for. Colin calls this a triple minor (probably because everything was a triple minor in those days) but the third couple is never mentioned and does nothing, so I've made it a duple minor.
Note that in this dance the stars only go halfway round, while in the previous dance in Thompson's book (The Salloon) the stars went all the way around in the same amount of music. Colin says in The Merry Meeting that when the stars go half round in four bars they should be preceded by taking your neighbor's hand and setting. He also says he has no evidence for this behavior, but it makes sense. In the 18th century people were more concerned with steps than figures and a chance to show off one's steps (which setting is) would be desired.
The tune was published by Thompson with the dance and the music was synthesized by Colin Hume's software.
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.
An online description of the dance may be found here.
| A1 | 1-2 | Take neighbor's hand and set |
| 3-4 | Right hands across half | |
| A2 | 1-2 | Take neighbor's hand and set |
| 3-4 | Left hands across half | |
| B1+2 | 1-8 | 1s lead down, turn, lead up and cast down as 2s lead up |
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=TheRose
The dance itself is out of copyright, and is in the public domain. The interpretation is copyright © 2025 by George Williams. And is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. My visualization of this dance is copyright © 2025 by George W. Williams V and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This website is copyright © 2021-2025 by George W. Williams V
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.