The Opera

The Opera or The Ape's Dance is an English Country Dance. It was published by John Playford (website) in 1675. It was interpreted by Colin Hume (website) in 2025 and published in Colin Hume's Website. It is a proper Duple Minor dance. It is a multipart dance. The dance lasts 112 bars. The tune is a jig. An online description of the dance may be found here.

John Playford writes:

Honour to the Presence, Lead up all forward and back That again First man and second Wo. change places, then first man and second Wo. and first Wo. and second man, take hands and walk round till you have just changed places, then fall back, then all four cross over in each other's places, then take hands and do the same thing again, and at the second crossing, the men take hands with your own and put back, then right-hands to your own, and left to the other Wo. then first man go down behind the second Wo. and the first Wo. in the middle, the man up in the middle, and the Wo. up behind the man, then set to each other and cast off: So to the bottom.

The tune was published by Playford for the dance. It 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), lead, poussette, rights and lefts, mad robin, cross go below, (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=TheOpera

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.