The Grunions
The Grunions is an English Country Dance. It was devised by George Williams in 2026. It is a proper Triple Minor dance. The minor set lasts 32 bars.
Grunions, Leuresthes tenuis, are a small sardine like fish which come out on the beaches of Southern California between March and August to mate under the light of the full (and new) moons. In the hours after the highest tides they surf the waves to the tideline, the females bury themselves halfway in the sand to lay eggs while the males swarm around them on the beach.
This dance attempts to emulate grunions. At the start, the grunions are swimming in the ocean with occasional scouts coming onto the beach. Then a big wave takes everyone onto the beach. Everyone swarms around W1, eventually leaving in different directions. Then another wave comes, and takes the grunions with it into the ocean where they go back to milling around, seemingly at random.
The dance becomes a 3 couple dance if, in the last 4 bars, the 1s+3s turn three quarters instead of once and a quarter. However, I like having multiple waves as you get in a triple minor.
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 this one) are licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: CC BY-NC-SA license.
| A1 | 1-8 | 1s+3s cast as 2s lead up, morris mirror hey |
| A2 | 1-2 | 1s cast below 3s |
| 3-4 | 1s lead to top, collecting first 3s, then 2s to end in a line of six, M2,M3,M1,W1,W2,W3 facing up | |
| 5-6 | Line of six lead up | |
| 7-8 | and set and face W1 | |
| B1 | 1-8 | Grunion hey: W1 sets, possibly rotating, possibly changing directions, M2+3, W3+2 in tandem changing leads, M1 (alone) pass W1, then W3+2, right, hey for three across |
| B2 | 1-2 | Set (1s facing up, flipping to face down at end) |
| 3-4 | Line of six, lead down | |
| 5-8 | 2s two hand turn to end facing out, as 1s face up, then handy hand turn 3s once and a quarter down to progressed places (1s facing out) |
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=TheGrunions
The dance is copyright © 2026 by George Williams. And is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 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.