The Rosetta
The Rosetta 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 Triple Minor dance. The minor set lasts 32 bars.
Thompson writes:
Turn Right hands then left lead down up again and cast off Allemand with Right hand then Left hands 6 quite round.
Colin does not provide an interpretation for this dance, saying that he would never call it as it is a) all about the 1s and b) too simple. It doesn't really need one though; Thompson's words are obvious. Anyway, for completeness sake, here's an animation.
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 | 1-4 | 1s right hand turn... |
| 5-8 | ...and left hand back | |
| A2 | 1-8 | 1s lead down, turn, lead up and cast down as 2s lead up |
| B1 | 1-4 | 1s regency allemande right... |
| 5-8 | ...and back by the left | |
| B2 | 1-8 | Circle six left all the way around |
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=TheRosetta
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.