Right And Left

Also known as: Rights and Lefts, Right Hand and Left, Circular Hey, Square Thru, Right and Left 4, Chaîne Anglaise, Chain Figure of Four.

An online definition may be found here.

Bars: 8.

Right and left is a figure for 4 people. You pass the person you are facing by the right hand, and then turn ninety degrees toward the center of the minor set. You are facing someone new, and you pass them by the left hand, and again turn ninety degrees toward the center of the set. You are now facing the person you were originally, and you repeat the same movements until you have returned to where you started.

This figure can be fractionalized.

Variants

Less common is "left and right" where you do essentially the same figure but start with the left hand instead of the right.

In Scottish Country Dance the dancers in M1+W2's positions do a polite turn on the last change to face in to the set.

Square Dancing's "Square Thru" has the dancers continue in the direction they were facing at in the last pass; they do not turn to face in.

History

Nicholas Dukes defines right and left on page 23 of his A Concise & Easy Method of Learning the Figuring part of Country Dances using Feuillet diagrams.

This is the first definition I know of, but the figure was used much earlier. Playford used it in 1657 in the dance Abergenny (I cannot find any examples in the Lovelace MS, nor in the first two editions of the Dancing Master).

Sometimes Playford says "right and left", sometimes "right hands and left", and sometimes "right and left hands".

In 1752 Johnson uses the term "Right and Left 6" (in the dance Lord Anson for Ever). I presume he means what would later be called a "grand chain".

French dances often called this the La Chaîne Anglaise, or even more simply La Chaîne (see Pierre Trappeniers's La Belle Anglaise).

Thomas Wilson becomes rather vehement that "Right and Left" actually means something completely different.

N.B. This Figure is very different from the "Quadrille Right and Left," which is the "Chain Figure of four."

He does later define his Chain Figure of four, which is, indeed, what everyone else means by right and left.

Cecil Sharp also decided to change the name of the figure. In 1911 he called it a "circular hey". I've no idea why. In the US, at least since the publication of The Playford Ball in 1994, the term "circular hey" means going through the pattern of right and left without taking hands, while "rights and lefts" means doing it with hands.

In the US, Elias Howe, 1858 uses "Right and Left 4". This is probably the same as "Right and Left", but it may not be because 60 years later Burchenal (1918) defines it as something related, but different, Ricky Holden also uses this definition in 1956, and Smukler & Millstone in 2008.

In Square Dancing: Henry Ford (Benjamin Lovett) gives the conventional definition of right and left in 1925, but Lloyd Shaw, in Cowboy Dances, 1939, talks about Right and Left Through and gives a close to modern definition of it.

Shaw's definition is still over and back, but by the time CallerLab came around Right and Left Through meant only half of what it originally did, and someone then came up with the figure "Square Thru" which is the original "Right and Left".

The earliest use of "Square Thru" that I've found so far is in Northern Junket, June, 1970, page 29. But with a comment that says the dance dates to 1968.

Some dances which (probably) use this figure

Dances for which I have animations
Dances in (R)SCDS Books

Note: This list may be incorrect or incomplete.

Right And Left

Variants

History

Some dances which (probably) use this figure

See Also