The Black Dance

Blac Dans ~ Landrin Black Dance ~ Rutherford Black Dance ~ Straight and Skillern The Black Dance

The Black Dance is a Scottish Country Dance. It was published by Thompson in 1770 in Twenty Four Country Dances for the Year 1770, London. It was interpreted by RSCDS Book 12 in 1938 and published in RSCDS Book 12. It is R8×32 3C/4C, a proper Triple Minor dance. R32.

The RSCDS attributes this to David Rutherford, but it was actually published by John, and, in any case was published earlier with the same figure by Thompson.

Rutherford writes:

Turn right hands and then left lead you Partner down and bring up the third Wo. then the first and third Cu. turn right hands & then left lead the third Wo. down and your Partner up & cast off.

For once the RSCDS interpretation seems to match the original closely.

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: hand turn (allemande), 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 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=TheBlackDance-RSCDS

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The dance itself is out of copyright, and is in the public domain. The interpretation is copyright © 1938 by RSCDS Book 12. My visualization of this dance is copyright © 2022 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.