Form
Each English country dance is based around a fixed series of movements, called figures, which are uniquely paired with a piece of music. The choreography dictates the interactions between partners and between couples in a set. A set is a group of couples, most commonly two or three, but sometimes four, that interact during a single progression. Rarely, dances call for five or six couples in a set. Most commonly, English country dances are longways and progressive. Multiple sets of couples form two long lines, along which couples travel at the end of each iteration of figures, meeting new couples and repeating the series of figures many times. Alternately, dances can be finite, a set forming an independent unit within which the series of figures are repeated a limited number of times. These dances are often non-progressive, each couple retaining their original positions.
Read more about this topic: English Country Dance
Famous quotes containing the word form:
“The opera isn’t over till the fat lady sings.”
—Anonymous.
A modern proverb along the lines of “don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.” This form of words has no precise origin, though both Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (16th ed., 1992)
“It may be said that the elegant Swann’s simplicity was but another, more refined form of vanity and that, like other Israelites, my parents’ old friend could present, one by one, the succession of states through which had passed his race, from the most naive snobbishness to the worst coarseness to the finest politeness.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“The old idea that the joke was not good enough for the company has been superseded by the new aristocratic idea that the company was not worthy of the joke. They have introduced an almost insane individualism into that one form of intercourse which is specially and uproariously communal. They have made even levities into secrets. They have made laughter lonelier than tears.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)