Antic Hay ~ Women
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Inspired by Keith Rose's Crib Diagrams, for Playford style dances I have added a few extra symbols.
Antic Hay ~ Women is an English Country Dance. It was devised by George Williams in 2026. It is a proper Triple Minor dance. It is a mixer. The minor set lasts 32 bars. Someone thought this dance was Very Hard.
The title comes from Huxley's novel Antic Hay, 1923 — which in turn takes it from Marlowe's Edward II, 1594:
My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns,In Huxley's novel people keep changing partners.
Shall with their goat-feet dance the antic hay;
In this dance the 2s and 3s change partners each time through the dance, while the 1s keep theirs until they reach the bottom. The third woman in each minor set will double progress (ending at the top) while the second woman will progress down (like the 1s). I also have a version where the men are the ones who progress oddly.
Behavior can be a bit odd at the ends, but if you start with 2 mod 3 couples (5,8,11,14...) then everything works mostly as expected, but don't try the usual trick of having the bottom two couples dance the figures, it won't work, simply have the bottom two couples change places at some point.
The dance also works as a three couple dance in a four couple set (Scottish style).
The half diagonal rights and lefts variation is taken from the dance The Pearl Strathspey by Jean Rhodes.
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 dances of George Williams (including this one) are licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: CC BY-NC-SA license.
| A1 | 1-4 | 1s cross, cast to 2nd place, and cross again into double triangle positions, as 2s meet and lead up |
| 5-6 | All set | |
| 7-8 | 1s turn the person on their right by the right halfway | |
| A2 | 1-2 | Top couple lead down as middle couple cast up |
| 3-4 | 1s+W2 circle left a third | |
| 5-8 | 1s half figure, woman up, man down, to 2nd place proper (everyone with new partner) | |
| B1 | 1-4 | On the right diagonal (1s+1st corners), half diagonal rights and lefts as others orbit counter-clockwise half |
| 5-8 | On the left diagonal (1s+2nd corners), half diagonal rights and lefts as others orbit clockwise half | |
| B2 | 1-8 | Top couple cross down between middle couple, as bottom couple cross, mirror heys on the sides, all couples crossing over at top and bottom |
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 transience of my youtube URLs. 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=AnticHay
The dance is copyright © 2026 by George Williams. And is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. My visualization of this dance is copyright © 2026 by George W. Williams V and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This website is copyright © 2021-2026 by George W. Williams V
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.