40 Years of Penguin Pam

40 Years of Penguin Pam is a New England Contra Dance. It was devised by Seth Tepfer in about 2019. It is a Becket dance. It is a quintuple progression dance. The minor set lasts 48 bars. Someone thought this dance was Intermediate / Hard.

A contra dance with a 48 bar tune (AABBCC) rather than the standard 32.

Also a dance with quintuple progression (the 1s end up with 2s from the minor set 5 below).

There are several oddities when out at the end. The rule of thumb is that if you are a lone couple at the end then make sure you are on the left (facing in to the set) since the progression happens on the left diagonal. If no one is across from you for the normal right and left through, ladies chain, or half hey then stand pat. If you are across from your partner at the end of the set (after the normal ladies chain) then the man needs to cross the set quickly to his partner's right to get into the diagonal hey. If a man is at the left end of his line for the diagonal hey, then he should stay put.

When we danced this in Santa Barbara we made a mistake and tried to dance two half heys rather than one continous hey with a kink in the middle. The result was the ladies ended up on the wrong side after the diagonal hey and did a left shoulder normal hey. It worked, but Seth's version flows better.

Seth's comments on seeing the animation:

This dance was written for my wife, Pam Eidson, on the occasion of her 40th birthday. She loves penguins. Thus the title.

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. 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 dance contains the following figures: hand turn (allemande), circle, hey, ladies chain (courtesy turn), right and left through, swing (and probably others).

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=40YearsOfPenguinPam

< Prev Top Next >

The dance is copyright © ~2019 by Seth Tepfer. My visualization of this dance is copyright © 2019 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.