Kiss

Also known as: Salute.

This figure is a little awkward in the modern world, and modern interpretations rarely include it. Sometimes a continental peck on the cheek is appropriate, or a right, left peck if two kisses are called for. Sometimes I will kiss the lady’s hand. In Kiss me quick, my Mither's coming I find there's only time to blow a kiss… but if you have an understanding with the person in question do what seems best.

History

In the 16th century when a gentleman led a woman out to dance he was expected to kiss her in greeting. You can see an example of this in Shakespeare's Henry VIII I.iv.128-129 when the king leads Anne Boleyn for a dance:

I were unmannerly to take you out
And not to kiss you. (He kisses Anne.) A health, gentlemen!

Both Lovelace and the early Playford dances occasionally have kissing as a figure in the dance, but its use dwindled, and 1710 is the last example I know of in Playford. Kynaston in Doctor Sa__lls Jigg, 1711, has both the 1s kiss their corners. Walsh in The Second Book of the Compleat Country Dancing-Master, ~1740 uses it in the dance Kiss Quick, Mother's a'Coming. And Johnson copied this dance a few years later.

Exactly what was kissed is usually not spelled out, but in Paul's Steeple, Playford says the man kisses the woman's hand.

According to the Fletts, the custom popped up again in the Shetland Islands in the nineteenth century, though only at the end of a dance.

The custom of kissing one's partner at the end of a dance was fairly common in Shetland in the old days, and is still not unknown at weddings. According to a description of a Shetland wedding written in 1859 (271), the custom was at that time observed at the end of each dance, but within living memory it took place only two or three times in an evening's dancing, generally at the end of a Shetland Reel. In Walls and Skeld the fiddler sometimes signalized the kisses by running his bow backwards and forwards over the high strings, but elsewhere it was usual for one of the men to shout `kiss the lasses' just as the Reel was coming to an end. The reaction of the girls to this custom is nicely described in an account of a wedding which took place in Scousburgh district in 1837 (275).

`Now the reel ends. "Kiss the lasses," exclaims the lad with the hairy bonnet, and four loud smackes are instantly heard, the lasses giving a twist or two in the arms of their partners, just for appearance sake, . . . this piece of hypocrisy is no fault of theirs, but arises from the tyranny of fashion. Poor things, why should they not like a kiss as well as the other sex? and when we all know so well that they do, how absurd that fashion should force them to appear as if they didn't.

J.P. Flett & T.M Flett Traditional Dancing in Scotland, 1964

Kiss

History

Some dances which (probably) use this figure

See Also