The Thrir Venstri Foetr Dance List

We usually have around 25 performance dances plus the teaching dances in our repertoire. Since it is unreasonable to expect newer dancers to learn that many different dances, the dances have been divided into levels. Teaching Dances are the simplest dances, everyone in the troupe is expected to be able to do them, they are the audience participation dances. Level 1 are the simpler dances that follow a well defined pattern. Level 2 dances are slightly more complex. Level 3 dances are very complex and/or do NOT follow the standard patterns. Each of the dances below is marked with its rating. The year is also being added (slowly).

Most of our dances are from John Playford's the " Dancing Master (1st Edition)." or "Orchesography" by Arbeau. Due to the increasing popularity and interest in period dancing, there are web pages available on these dances. If you have others that should be included in this list, please email me (Eowyn [AT] wam [DOT] umd [DOT] edu

A collection of some of the music that we use for the dances put into MP3 format (computer created music) by Doug Milewski is at http://www.mindspring.com/~dmilewski/ecdp/mp3/.
The second edition of Playford's book is available on the web (in original Playfordese) at http://www.shipbrook.com/jeff/playford/index.html which was created by Jeff Lee.
The first edition (1651) is available at http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~flip/contrib/dance/playford.html
Orchesography by Thoinot Arbeau (1588) is available at: http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~sca/src/contributed/grm/dance/arbeau.html
The Library of Congress has several books on dancing on the web (usually page images) at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/dihtml/dihome.html which is their dance history web site.
Pryankster's web page of Playford dances can be found at http://www.pryanksters.org/playford.html. Merri Pryanksters is based in California.

This page written and maintained by Eowyn, questions/comments can be emailed to thrirvenstrifoetr (AT) gmail [DOT] com -- address is set up in an attempt to slow the influx of spam/viruses to my account.