The Sword Dance, 1702

The Sword Dance, 1702 is an English Country Dance. It was published by Henry Playford (website) in 1702 in Twenty Four New Country Dances, London. It was interpreted by George Williams in 2022. It is a proper Duple Minor dance. The minor set lasts 16 bars.

Playford writes:

The 1. man casts off and the wo. slips down between the 2. cu. then slips in their own places Then your Partner casts off, and the 1. man meets her below and slips up as before Then clap hands and cast off Then half Figure and turn

John Young published another dance with this name in 1710, with a different figure and different music.

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.

A11-4M1 casts below 2s as W1 slips down, both slip back up
A21-4W1 casts below 2s as M1 slips down, both slip back up
B11-21s clap hands: own, partner's right, own, left
3-41s cast down as 2s lead up
B21-21s half figure eight up through 2s
3-41s two hand turn half

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=TheSwordDance1702

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The dance itself is out of copyright, and is in the public domain. The interpretation is copyright © 2022 by George Williams. And is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 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.