Ye Social Powers

Ye Social Powers is an English Country Dance. It was published by Thompson in 1778 in Twenty four Country Dances for the Year 1778, London. It was interpreted by George Williams in 2021. It is a proper Triple Minor dance. The minor set lasts 40 bars.

Thompson writes:

Cast off 2d Cu: & set, cast off 3d Cu: & set same up again cross over two Cu: lead up to the top, cast off and hands 4 round at bottom set contrary Corners Right and Left at top

The A music has 8 bars, and the B 16. However Bare Necessities (album At Home, dance "Once a Night", says this music is AABBC for 40 bars, so I'm going to assume there should be a repeat mark 8 bars into the B section, and the rest is a C section. Therefore there should also be a " " mark after "lead up to the top".

While the first part of the B section takes 16 bars, but the second part looks to take 10 bars which can probably be squeezed into 8.

I'm a little confused by "cross over two Cu: lead up to top", "cross over" usually means cross and go below, here it probably means go below two couples. The only difficulty is there is no way mentioned for the 1s to get back to proper.

They could cross again at the bottom of the set (and lead up proper), or lead up improper and have the man assist the woman into a cross-over cast.

Then there is "set contrary corners right and left at top". I'm going to insert a comma after "corners" and assume that the 1s set, and then do rights and lefts (rather than that they set right and then left.

But "set contrary corners" isn't something I'm familiar with. I assume it means set to the corner on the right, then to the corner on the left. But that's 4 bars of setting, leaving 4 bars for the rights and lefts. Which is rather fast for rights and lefts.

If, however, the 1s are still improper, then three changes of rights and lefts (starting with neighbor) would make them proper and could be done in 4 bars.

So they probably shouldn't do a cross over cast (at the start of B2) after all.

But now the 2s are improper at the end, so have them two hand turn half after they lead up in B2.

The tune was published with the dance. It was performed by Bare Necessities (Earl Gaddis, Mary Lea, Peter Barnes, and Jacqueline Schwab) on the album At Home. The music is used with permission from the Country Dance Society, Boston Centre, Inc.

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 (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.

A11-41s cast down as 2s move up, and 1s set
5-81s cast down as 3s move up, and 1s set
A21-41s cast up as 3s move down, and 1s set
5-81s cast up as 2s move down, and 1s set
B11-81s cross, go below 3s, and lead up (improper)
B21-41s long cast down as 2s lead up and two hand turn half
5-8Circle four at bottom
C1-41s set to right corner, then set to left corner
5-81s+2s three changes of rights and lefts starting with neighbor

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=YeSocialPowers

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The dance itself is out of copyright, and is in the public domain. The interpretation is copyright © 2021 by George Williams. And is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. My visualization of this dance is copyright © 2021 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.