ANST - HOLE IN THE WALL DANCE ON TV

Mark.S Harris mark.s.harris at motorola.com
Mon Apr 16 16:20:45 PDT 2001


My beautiful wife, Lady Alina Mitchell said:

> Last night I was watching 'WIVES & DAUGHTERS' on PBS and guess what I
> saw? It was during a ball scene of this 19th century drama that I saw
> them dancing 'HOLE IN THE WALL' step by step by step. I do remember
> being told in dance class that this dance is documented but it's, of
> course, post-SCA period (19th century). But none the less, I was amazed
> and wondered where they found this dance.

"Hole in the Wall" while out of period for the SCA is not out of
period by much and certainly earlier that the 19th century. Below
I have pasted a snippet from the dance-msg file in the Florilegium.

Stefan li Rous
stefan at texas.net
(I LIKE "Hole in the Wall". It is one *I* can remember and it's
closer to period than madeup SCA dances like "Duchess
Rondalin(sp?)'s Pavan".)

> The standard primary source for historical ECD (as opposed to
> "traditional" ECD, which is largely based on Cecil Sharpe's
> collections in the early 20th century) is John Playford's "The
> English Dancing Master", which was first published in 1651 and became
> so popular it went through something like twenty editions in the next
> fifty years.  It includes a lot of English country dances, with steps
> and music.  The edition number matters: even between the first and
> second editions there were significant changes to the music and some
> of the dances to conform to rapidly-changing preferences in musical
> modes and dance sets.
> 
> I have a reprint of the first edition, re-edited by Hugh Mellor and
> Leslie Bridgewater and published by Dance Books Ltd., 9 Cecil Court,
> London WC2 (England, of course).  I found it in a music store in
> Maryland that specialized in folk stuff, priced at $10 about seven
> years ago.
> 
> The first edition contains neither "Hole in the Wall" nor "Strip the
> Willow"; I believe "Hole in the Wall" showed up in a later edition
> around 1680 and "Strip the Willow" dates to two hundred years later,
> but I'm not certain of either of those.
> 
> 				mar-Joshua ibn-Eleazar ha-Shalib
> -- 
> 					Stephen Bloch
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