I was surprised to discover I didn't have this dance in my collection so
found it on line as well as Penn's explanation of the folk process that
created it. I'm sharing it here because I think it's such a neat story.
Author's Notes:
"Honor Among Thieves" underlines the borrowing or "stealing" that goes with
composing "new" dances. Originally I had been thinking about incorporating
old-time square dance moves into contra dancing because of the popularity of
squares in the Northwest. In a 1982 visit with Ted Sannella, I asked him
about his newest dances. He gave me "New Friendship Reel" which used "lady
around two." Feeling somewhat miffed that a New Englander had beaten me to
the punch, I wrote a dance using the move more in the context that it was
used in Northwest square dancing. Ignoring Ted's sage advice about never
calling a new dance without first dancing it, I tried what I called "The
G-Note Reel" at Tod Whittemore's Cambridge dance the next night. It met with
mixed success. Tod then revised it, with the new version including the
circles (see the 1982 version below). Upon hearing the story, Peter Barnes
came up with the name "Honor Among Thieves". In 1986, I further revised the
dance, borrowing from the popular sequence of the circle into a swing.
Ironically, this sequence was the one Ted had used in his dance but that I
had changed. The traditional tune, "Wind That Shakes The Barley" (in the
book) works well with the dance and can be played ABAB rather than AABB.
The dance and a bit more history is here:
http://arcserv.astro.washington.edu/dances/FMPro?-db=acdol.db&-format=danceformat.html&-sortfield=Name&-recid=72&-find
