On 10/26/15 7:36 AM, Colin Hume via Callers wrote:
Well, now we've moved on from political correctness to dance interpretation
(reconstruction) I have some interest in the matter.
On Mon, 26 Oct 2015 01:40:18 -0700, Alan Winston via Callers wrote:
�Basically, Cecil Sharp made up *and named* the Gypsy figure.
Are you sure he didn't get it from the Morris dancers he collected the dances
from?
I always enjoy it when somebody says: "I'm comprehensively wrong but my
point still stands." So, I'm comprehensively wrong:
- Sharp didn't use the term gypsy in the Country Dance Books, and now I
don't even know how we started using it as a country dance figure name.
- I didn't know morris dancers used "gypsy" rather than "gyp", as you
say on the web page. (This isn't even evidence, really, but in my 20+
years dancing morris in the US I never heard "gypsy" rather than "gyp"
or "gip".) (In my long screed earlier, I did say that I thought Sharp
(or whoever) probably got it from morris.)
But my point still stands:
Defining "gypsy" as a country dance figure is an act of imagination or
creation. (That's what I meant by "made up".) Unless you can present a
historical country dance source that uses the figure by name, there's no
reason to think that the figure was called that, or that the figure name
was in common use, which makes it a considerable stretch that it
contemporaneously picked up the name from the Spanish Jeepsie dance, and
that would seem to make it vanishingly unlikely that morris dancers
picked up the name from country dancing.
�In Spanish Jeepsie - reconstructed at the link you have above- the
�figure isn't a gypsy, and it isn't called a gypsy. �It's a back to
�back.
That's their interpretation, but I'm not sure it's correct.
I've been working on a web page about this figure, and the discussion has
inspired me to do more to it. See what you think.
http://colinhume.com/degipsy.htm
Interesting, as always. (I did acknowledge in my long screed that there
were multiple interpretations of the text that's being considered to be
a gypsy.)
-- Alan
