English Country Dance Links

• Starting Point
  
• Wider Connections
  
• Articles on this website
• Country Dance Resources on other websites
• Dance Music Resources
• For links and information on English, Contra, Scottish, Anglo/American period dance, and Anglo performance dance groups in the wider Philadelphia region, see our Dances in the Region page.
  

««« Germantown Country Dancers' Main Page

  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. Find an English, Contra, or ritual dance anywhere in North America: CDSS Affiliated Groups Page The site also has a complete list of CDSS bookstore items. You can find the programs for CDSS summer camp sessions at Pinewoods, Buffalo Gap, and Ogontz here, too.

  Wider Connections

• Dance Gypsy: The master schedule for a contra/country dance fanatic's summer season, plus other links, articles, information.
• Webfeet's English Folk Dance Events and Links Page (UK).
• Pinewoods Camp
  
• English Folk Dance and Song Society.
• The English Country Dance Mailing List. Subscribe to the whole list, to a weekly report, or access the many years of archives by thread topic.

  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.
  
• Tanya Rotenberg's Memories of Mary Kay
  Sandy Rotenberg's Reflections on Mary Kay
  
• Remembering Dick Kraus
• 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

• English Dance Archive indexes several sites that have instructions for Playford, Ceilidh, traditional English dances.
  
• Hugh Stewart's Dance Index will tell you where instructions to traditional English, Playford, and Traditional American contras and squares are published. Quite up to date with the latest dance publications-- callers will find it a big help.
  
• 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....
  
• And if you don't find it there, the British Library's collection might have it.
  
• 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.
  
• Historical Background of English Country Dance
  
• A nice collection of Dance quotations about social dance, with lots of historical and anthropological tidbits added in (some information is inaccurate "accepted" wisdom, but hey, they're quotes).
• Will Linden maintains a long list of country/contra links for CD*NY.
  
  

  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.
  
  

  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
• Tune Archive of 1000+ traditional British-related folk dance tunes.
• Fortissimo Links to folk music in Philadelphia --performing artists, folk music venues in the region.
• 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.