I feel kind of stuck in perpetuating the use of the term "Petronella".
I'll use it in the walkthrough because that
orients the experienced dancers immediately and than call "spin" or
"twirl" and probably keep calling
"make a ring and balance now" longer than than I call the twirl.) I
think it's courteous to the newer dancers to
identify how the figure is commonly called so they'll have a chance of
knowing it the next time somebody else calls it, but it certainly is
just about the most undescriptive name possible.
Scottish dancing also has a "Petronella turn" - not surprisingly, since
the chestnut contra seems to derive from something published in
Edinburgh by Gow in, uh, 1820 or something - but it is different in
detail from the contra one. (And in the Scottish dance, the actives
only do the Petronella move first, then balance (pas-de-basque) in
place.) Dudley Laufman wrote some time back that the chestnut contra
had the same thing as the Scottish - just the actives traveling - until
somebody imported the all-in-and-out all-travel-twirling from an English
trad dance called Roxburgh Castle (which uses a rant step,
incidentally). So the whole BTR-Petronella-turn thing is completely a
20th-century invention in contra dancing. [Not that this is directly
responsive to the original question; I just think it's interesting.]
-- Alan
On 11/23/2012 1:30 PM, Rich Goss wrote:
I never use the term Petronella for that move. It's always "spin to the right" or twirl to
the right" For me. Petronella is the name of a Chestnut that the move comes from as most all of you
know. Callers used to say "as in the dance Peronella..." but through the evolutionary
process is no longer mentioned. The move has taken on the name of the dance. That said, if's my
personal preference not to use that name for the move. It does bug me a little when other callers use
it as the name for the move, but not enough to say anything or lose any sleep over it.
Rich
On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 3:10 PM, Maia McCormick <[email protected]> wrote:
So I had my first introduction to contradance through my school, taught by
student callers who had been taught by student callers before them, etc. I
was first taught to call a Petronella as... a Petronella. And then as I
started going to more outside dances and started reading up on the practice
of calling, I heard the move more and more just called as "balance the ring
and spin to the right" or "balance the ring and spin to swap."
So, esteemed caller-folk, I ask you: how do* you* call a Petronella Turn?
By name, or with some other turn of phrase? Do you have any sense how
widespread either of these conventions are? Why not just call a Petronella
a Petronella? If you call it by description rather than by name, do you
generally put the entire call together (e.g. "BALance the RING and SPIN to
the RIGHT") or break it up ("BALance the RING... and SPIN to the RIGHT" so
that "spin to the right" ends up coming on beats 3 & 4, just before the
actual spinning occurs)? Any thoughts are welcome!
Cheers,
Maia
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