La Belle Anglaise
La Belle Anglaise is a European Contredanse. It was published by Pierre Trappeniers in 1777 in Recueil de Contredanses (Trappeniers), Brussels. It was interpreted by George Williams in 2023. It is a proper Triple Minor dance. The minor set lasts 48 bars.
La Belle Anglaise is a dance in the European (French) contredanse style, which derived from English Country dance.
It was written by a Belgian (though Belgium at the time was part of the Austrian Empire) who divised many other Contredanse.
Trappeniers writes:
no1 Les deux premieres Couples figurent et font le Moulinet.
no2 Défaire de même
no3 La premiere couple fair le grand Huit.
no4 On remonte de deux couples en dedans en on passe une couple è dos. no5 Le Cavalier figure avec la Dame de la Couple en bas et fait un tour de deeu mains,
ensuite la Dame fait le même ave le Cavalier de la même Couple.
no6 On fait un tour de rond avec cette même Couple.
no7 On fait la Chaine avec le Couple en haut.
Trappaniers gives 7 figures. Some appear to me to take 4 bars, some 8. The music consists of 2 eight bar strains. A simple addition of what I think the words mean gives me 44 bars of movement, which doesn't make sense. So I'm going to assume that "on fait un tour de rond" means circle left and then circle right; that will give me 48 bars.
Do I want AABBAB, AAABBB, or ABABAB? I expect AABBAB will annoy the musicians. AAABBB seems more interesting to me, but what do I know?
Many thanks to Johan Van Der Elst for placing Trappeniers's Recueil de Contredanses online.
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 interpretations like this one) are licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: CC BY-NC-SA license.
An online description of the dance may be found here.
| A1 | 1-4 | 1s+2s right hands across... |
| 5-8 | ...and back by the left | |
| A2 | 1-8 | 1s full figure eight down around the 2s |
| A3 | 1-8 | 1s lead below 3s and cast up to 2nd place as the 2s lead up |
| B1 | 1-4 | M1+W3 two hand turn |
| 5-8 | W1+M3 two hand turn | |
| B2 | 1-4 | 1s+3s circle left... |
| 5-8 | ...and back to the right | |
| B3 | 1-8 | 1s+2s face partner, four changes of rights and lefts |
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=LaBelleAnglaise
The dance itself is out of copyright, and is in the public domain. The interpretation is copyright © 2023 by George Williams. And is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. My visualization of this dance is copyright © 2023 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
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.