Country dance

A country dance is any of a very large number of social dances of a type that originated in England in the British Isles; it is the repeated execution of a predefined sequence of figures, carefully designed to fit a fixed length of music, performed by a group of people, usually in couples, in one or more sets.

[3] Introduced to South America by French immigrants, Country Dance had great influence upon Latin American music as contradanza.

Thomas Wilson, in 1808, wrote, "A Country Dance is composed of an indefinite number of persons, not less than six, but as many more as chuse, but six are sufficient to perform any figure in the treatise.

A figure is a pattern that the dancers trace along the floor, simple ones such as Circle Left are intuitive and can be danced with no prior knowledge, while complex moves such as Strip the willow need to be taught.

Each dance consists of a series of figures, hopefully smoothly linked together, designed to fit to the chosen music.

[19] John Playford's The English Dancing Master (1651) listed over a hundred tunes, each with its own figures.

Playford and his successors had a practical monopoly on the publication of dance manuals until 1711, and ceased publishing around 1728.

During this period English country dances took a variety of forms including finite sets for two, three and four couples as well as circles and squares.

The country dance was introduced to the court of Louis XIV of France, where it became known as contredanse, and later to Germany and Italy.

This was subsequently translated into English by John Essex and published in England as For the Further Improvement of Dancing.

[20] By the 1720s the term contradanse had come to refer to longways sets divided into groups of three or two couples, which would remain normative until English country dance's eclipse.

[13] The square-set type also had its vogue in France and spread to much of Europe, Russia and North America during the later 18th century as the quadrille[23] and the cotillion.

Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy all loved country dancing and put detailed descriptions into their novels.

The contradanza, the Spanish and Spanish-American version of the French contradanse, became an internationally popular style of music and dance in the 18th century.

The contradanza was popular in Spain and spread throughout Spanish America during the 18th century, where it took on folkloric forms that still exist in Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Panama and Ecuador.

Interpreters and composers of the 20th century include Douglas and Helen Kennedy, Pat Shaw, Tom Cook, Ken Sheffield, Charles Bolton, Michael Barraclough, Colin Hume, Gary Roodman, and Andrew Shaw.

The modern English country dance community in the United States consists primarily of liberal white professionals.