English Country Dance Links
Starting Point
- Seven Day Guide to Folk, Social, and Traditional Dancing in and around Philadelphia. "Detail about nearly every public event and regular dance in the Philadelphia Region!"
- NEFFA Links--the most extensive set of folk music & dance links on the Web.
- Country Dance and Song Society. GCD is an affiliate of this 100+ year old umbrella organization for English, Contra, ritual dance, and song traditions across North America: CDSS Affiliated Groups Page You can also explore the CDSS online store for your endless listening and learning pleasure. CDSS runs a lot of programs, most notably summer camps sessions , some for adults, some all-ages, at Pinewoods Camp in eastern Massachusetts, Camp Louise in north central Maryland, Camp Cavell on the shores of lake Huron, and Ogontz in New Hampshire.
Wider Connections
- Pinewoods Camp
- English Folk Dance and Song Society.
- The English Country Dance Mailing List. Subscribe to the whole list or to a weekly report.the ECD list archives cover many decades.
Resources & Articles on GCD's website
- Scott & Jenny's Dance database (tune name, meter, formation, key)
- Jenny Beer & Joanna Reiner's Dancing on Campus For anyone starting or leading a campus-based dance group: Notes from a discussion and presentation at NEFFA 2002.
- Jenny Beer's Notes from Caller Class.
-
Memories of past GCD members
- Bruce Hamilton's advice
on giving feedback to callers (which applies to many other
situations as well.)
Country Dance Resources on other websites
Dance instructions, History, Archives
- Compendium
of ALL the Playford Dancing Master volumes with a quickly
searchable database. The scanned original pages of these 1,053 dances
and tunes can be a bit hard to read, but what a great resource. Thank
you, Bob Keller!
- How to read Playford--what all those symbols and abbreviations mean.
- Library
of Congress Dance texts An unbelievably rich collection of several
hundred dance manuals -- most in .pdf copies of all pages as well as
text files of each book. Browse facsimilies of Playford, Walsh,
Young....
- SCA
articles and research on English Country Dance (Scroll down a bit.)
The Society for Creative Anachronism is a different contemporary stream
of ECD revival and new choreography. This is a list of their dance
research newsletter archives. The piece on How
to Reconstruct a Playford Dance explains they symbols, the
footwork, the figures as Playford abbreviated them.
Individual Dance Websites
- Colin Hume on dance technique--27 topics!
- Judy Rivkin's ECD animation! (requires bandwidth or patience, but it is well worth it!).
- See what Gary Roodman is up to--he posts his latest dances on his website.
- Linda Wolfe's 1997 NY Times article on English Country Dancing-- Stepping with Jane Austen.
Online Events During COVID-19 Quarantine
Resources on Dance Music, on Dance Health
Music
- Chamber's tune search will print the music for most any Anglo or Celtic traditional tune, often with several versions. Tunes are available in several formats--pdf, abc, gif, etc. For example, "Off She Goes" turns up 51 versions, "Apley House" 12.....
- Some thoughts on Playing for Folk Dancing by Eric Foxley, and his
- Philadelphia Folk Song Society
Dance Health, Injuries
- Dance injuries: An extensive compilation of information and links on preventing and healing Scottish Dance injuries (but still relevant to us English Country dancers!)--shin splints, heel spurs, ankle pain, wise warm-ups, icing and other immediate care for injuries.