Fireflies

Fireflies is an English Country Dance. It was devised by Fried de Metz Herman (website) in 1987. It is a proper Duple Minor dance. The minor set lasts 32 bars.

The tune is a traditional one called: Friar Bungy. It was performed by Dave Bartley, Ruthie Dornfeld and Terry Wergeland for the Seattle English Country Dance Ball, 2025. The music is used with permission from the performers.

The animation plays at 107 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 (no music plays during this slow set). 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), gypsy, cast, lead, figure eight, double figure eight, back to back, (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 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=Fireflies

The dance is copyright © 1987 by Fried de Metz Herman. 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.