Bonny Breast Knot

Bonny Breast Knot is an English Country Dance. It is a traditional dance with no clear origin. It was interpreted by Maud Karpeles & Cecil Sharp in about 1930. Originally a Triple Minor this version is a proper 3 Couple Longways dance. In this dance the couples are permuted by: 231. The minor set lasts 32 bars.

Originally a triple minor (1s simply gallop back to 2nd place rather than 3rd).

Collected by Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles from Somerset and Devon but not published until after Sharp's death.

Hugh Stewart says that Karpeles published it as a triple minor, and the change to the 3 couple longways probably was first published in the 1948 Community Dances Manual, Vol. 2.

Very similar to Jamie Allent, a dance from the US.

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.

An online description of the dance may be found here.

The dance contains the following figures: lead, swing, siding, turn corners (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=BonnyBreastKnot

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I do not have a publication date for the dance and do not know whether it is under copyright or not. The interpretation is copyright © ~1930 by Maud Karpeles & Cecil Sharp. My visualization of this dance is copyright © 2021 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.