The Geud Contra of Ballangigh
The Geud Contra of Ballangigh is a New England Contra Dance. It was devised by Peter Foster in 2006. It is an improper duple minor longways dance. The minor set lasts 32 bars. Someone thought this dance was Easy / Intermediate. An online description of the dance may be found here.
Peter Foster suggests using an assisted cast in A1/A2 (where the inactives take hands with the actives and turn with them.
May also be found on Caller's Box.
The tune, called Hunt the Squirrel, was published in the 14th edition of The Dancing Master. It was performed by Bare Necessities (Earl Gaddis, Mary Lea, Peter Barnes, and Jacqueline Schwab) on the album A Playford Ball. The music is used with permission from the Country Dance Society, Boston Centre, Inc.
The animation plays at 115 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: circle, cast, hey, 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 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=TheGeudContraOfBallangigh
The dance is copyright © 2006 by Peter Foster. 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.