Mr. Clayton's Facer

Mr. Clayton's Facer is an English Country Dance. It was devised by Nathaniel Kynaston in 1711. It was interpreted by Colin Hume (website) in 2025 and published in Colin Hume's Website. 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 36 bars. The tune is a jig. An online description of the dance may be found here.

Kyanaston writes:

Note The first Strain twice the last once.

The 1^st man take the 2^d man by his right hand lead him round the 2^d wo. the 1^st man cast above his partner into his place the 2^d man cast off below the 2^d wo. into his place the 1^st and 2^d wo. do the same only the 1^st wo. with her left hand take the 2^d wo. by her right the 1^st man turn the 3^d wo. quite round the 1^st wo. turn the 2^d man at the same time then turn partners the 1^st man take hands and go half round with y^e 3^d cu. and back again 1^st wo. do the same with the 2^d cu. at the same time clap hands partners and turn S

The tune was published by Walsh with the dance, and the music was synthesized using Colin Hume's software.

The animation plays at 113 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), turn single, circle, cast, lead (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=MrClaytonsFacer

The dance itself is out of copyright, and is in the public domain. The interpretation is copyright © 2025 by Colin Hume. 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.