Mi Contra Fa

May Pease II

Because it seemed a little lame to repeat the same line when there could be couplets:

May time is here, let us dance and let us sing-o
Flowers in bloom and the birds all on the wing-o

Bagpipe plays loudly a merry melody-o
Lasses and lads in a jolly jubilee-o

Birds in the trees all sing gaily in the sun-o
Take hands with me and together we will run-o

Buds on the boughs mean that spring is coming in-o
Sing all who know that the summer will begin-o

Bring in the May and leave flowers on my door-o
Give me but one, love, and I will give you four-o

Kiss me, my dear, in the morning of the May-o
Leave not my arms, but my dear, please will you stay-o?

Play on the grass in the fresh dew of the morn-o
Springtime is come and the world, it is reborn-o.

May time is here, let us dance and let us sing-o
Flowers in bloom and the birds all on the wing-o

May Pease

Original May carol lyrics for Pease Bransle.  I take a liberty with the refrain.  It actually goes:

Men: quarter-quarter-half
Women: 4 quarters

The lyrics instead give the women three notes/syllables, like the men.  They can either hold the 3rd quarter for the length of a half note while the instruments play the 4th, or sing both quarter notes to the one syllable.

Verses:
May time is here, let us dance and let us sing-o (2x)

Bagpipe plays loudly a merry melody-o (2x)

Birds in the trees sing gaily in the sun-o (2x)

Buds on the boughs mean that spring is coming in-o (2x)

Bring in the May and leave flowers on my door-o (2x)

Kiss me, my dear, in the morning of the May-o (2x) 
(yeah, I know. May-o, mayo.  But is May-time or May-day any better, esp. with every other line being end-o?)

Play on the grass in the fresh dew of the morn-o (2x)

May time is here, let us dance and let us sing-o (2x)

Chorus (the hopping part):

Men: Come with me!
Women: Go with you?
Men: Come with me and merry be!

Women: I will stay.
Men: You will stay?
Women: I will stay and sing and play

Joan Sanderson, or The Cushion Dance

When I was an undergraduate at Rutgers, we had masked balls twice a year.  And very often we danced "Prinkum Prankum," as our dance mistress called it, which I have never seen danced anywhere else.

Well, it's in Playford, starting in 1686.  The tune does not look like how I remember her singing it, and the actions are not quite the same, but it's clearly where it comes from.  The way we danced it, Man or Woman stood in the center of the ring and called out Joan or John (actually 'insert name here' as I think is indicated by the nonuse of italics in the original) Sanderson.  The cushion was placed; somebody knelt (I don't recall if it was Sanderson, the person calling out, or always the Man) and there was a hand-kiss.  The two exchanged places, leaving Sanderson in the center for the next go-round of the dance.

This is what I read from Playford:

Note: The first strain twice.  The second once.  And the last as oft as is required.

This Dance is begun by a single person (either Man or Woman) who taking a Cushion in their Hand dances about the Room, and at the end of the Tune they stop and sing This Dance it will no further go.  The Musicians answer, I pray you good Sir, why say you so?  Man, Because Joan Sanderson will not come too.  Music. She must come too, and she shall come too, and she must come whether she will or no.  Then he lays down the Cushion before a Woman, on which she kneels, and he Kisses her, singing, Welcome Joan Sanderson, welcome, welcome.  Then she rises, takes up the Cushion and both dance singing, Prinkum-prankum is a fine Dance, and we shall go dance it once again, once again, and once again, and shall we dance it once again?  Then making a stop, the Woman sings as before, This Dance, &c.  Music, I pray you Madam, &c.  Woman. Because John Sanderson &c.  Music. He must. &c.  And so she lays down the Cushion before a Man, who kneeling upon it salutes her, she singing, Welcome John Sanderson, &c.  Then he taking up the Cushion, they take hands and dance around, singing as before; and thus they do til th whole Company are taken into the Ring.  And if there is Company enough, make a little Ring in the middle, and within that Ring set a Chair, and lay the Cushion on it, and the first Man set on it.  Then the Cushion is laid before the first Man, the Woman singing, This Dance, &c. (as before) only instead of -come to, they sing -go fro; and instead of Welcome John Sanderson, &c., they sing Farewell, John Sanderson, Farewell, Farewell; and so they go out one by one as they came in.  Note, the Woman is kissed by all the Men in the Ring at her coming in and going out, and likewise the Man by all the Women.

The words are almost what I recall.  I think we sang, "I pray you, good master/mistress."  We never did the bit with the chair, and we never collected all the dancers in the center of the ring.

Playford gives a little diagram of four couples in a ring but there is no choreography, just "they dance."  We only danced during the "Prinkum-prankum" parts, as the dance stopped at the declaration, "This dance it may no further go."  I think we just doubled left and right; two full sets.  There's not room to do much else.

I bring this up because spring starts on Saturday, which means it's maypole season again.  This sort of kissing game-dance seems very suitable for an adult maypole.

The Rutgers reconstruction has the advantage of not requiring kissing the entire Company, which can get prickly in the SCA with people having widely varying ideas about appropriate casual personal contact.  On the downside, the dance mistress had to watch carefully and end the dance when it started to become clear that favorites were emerging and certain people were being passed over.  I'm leaning towards doing it the Rutgers way, if only because I saw it done without social disaster occuring.  I'm not so sure how the original Playford version would go.

Caroles in The Decameron

First, how have I not read The Decameron before now?  If you have not read it, go forth and find a copy for as little as a penny.  (Or it will be at your library for free.)  The table of contents handily summarizes each tale, so you can find the naughty ones easily.  (There is an online Decameron, but it has older translations that gloss over some of the most amusing tales.)

Now that the PSA is done... in between the one hundred tales, there is a little bit of prose about the ten tellers.  Not much, really, and on my first lookings-through there's only one of the ten who even qualifies as a character (Dioneo).  But, before and after every batch of stories, the young people sing and dance caroles.  The king or the queen of the day selects one to lead the dance, one or two to play instruments, and one to sing.  All sing choruses.

Brilliant!  The main vocalist does not dance!  Breathing problems solved!

Because someone "leads the dance," I am guessing they are making it up as they go along, or else it's vaguely conga-line like.  Some quick experimentation has shown me you can dance the Tangle Bransle steps (left single x3, right single) to: The Lusty Young Smith, any ballad, Wild Mountain Thyme, The Chandler's Wife. This implies you could dance any four repeating dance steps to possibly most of the SCA traditional song corpus.  You might be able to invent alternating dance steps (e.g., left single x3, right single; left single x3, turn single, repeat all) but you might also run into problems with the ends of verses or choruses; similarly, you may or may not be able to have separate chorus choreography.

Or, in summary: It is dead easy to repeat ad infinitum any four bars of dance steps to a variety of SCA songs.  Anything more complicated will require forethought.  Possibly not much, but some.

Maypole: Finis

Documentation is done. Yay! The blog makes posting HTML pages easy enough, and for most people, that'll be the most convenient way to read them. But they often print out poorly. I could, in theory, create a PDF of the documentation and also post it. But that seems awfully "belt and suspenders" and a waste of storage space besides. Hm. The "print preview" doesn't look too bad (from this browser, on this platform). Ten pages? Really? Sweet.

Maypole: Results in Two Parts and Conclusions

Part the First: The Planned Maypoles

They were "eh, okay."  Maltese Cuckoo was definitely more of a hit than Official.

The Guppy Gala was very well attended.  Our "medieval village" was placed on a grassy slope downhill from a terraced plaza.  The geography was such that most of the attendees remained on the terrace and did not wander down into our area.  (There was no exit, so no foot traffic through.)  We did get a fair number of walk-throughs, usually one or two families at a time.

If you think that makes getting a group together for a dance difficult, you're right.

I made "Official Month of Maying" the first attempt; we had two little boys (maybe three to start?), myself, Lady Patricia and... was that it?  It was a very small circle.  So I decided to try and dance and sing, which was a Bad Idea.  On so many levels:

• I had a cold, so my voice was already half-shot.
• I was dancing, so I was out of breath.
• Lady Patricia was not playing her recorder, so the dance band was playing "in the key they knew the song."  This was not, apparently, a key I could find with two hands and a flashlight.
• Between the cold, trying to find the key, and remember the words, I forgot the dance.  Yes, I realized in the middle of the second verse that we were just left-singling our way around the pole.

Now, the last one wasn't as bad as all that.  The kids could have cared less.  They seemed to have a good time, which was good, but I felt like the performance was just flat, flat, flat.

Later, we tried "Maltese Cuckoo."  We had a fair half-dozen eight-year old and an ambitious preschooler to start.  They were not enthusiastic about singing, but were interested in dancing.  There were some missteps early on; the band played a really, really, really slow tempo, so slow that I was taking steps on the first and third beats of each measure and it took the first verse to figure out what the problem was.  Once I caught on, I stuck to calling out the steps in the same slow tempo to keep the kids with it.  After two choruses and a verse, they seemed to have it well in-hand, so I started singing - and the older kids all vanished!  I don't know if that was cause-effect, or if they were bored with the slow beat of the dance.   But they just evaporated.

The music started to pick up at about that time, and we caught the eyes of other kids, mostly younger.  We opened the circle at need, wondered aloud if the musicians could go even faster, and had a swell time.  We sang a few choruses and skipped the verses.  Our original preschooler, who stuck through til the end, was laughing with glee.  That was nice.

I did a lousy job teaching the choruses in either case.  In the first case, I'd picked up on a general sense of rush - "Come on kids, there's so much more to see!" and wanted to get to the dancing, stat.  In the second case, the kids were vocally disinterested in learning the song and I didn't press it.

On the other hand, I think I taught the dances just fine - aside from, you know, screwing up Official Bransle while we danced it. On the other hand, the kids got through it fine, without confusion and with smiles, so it couldn't have been that bad.

 

Part the Second: Other Dancing

Three Left Feet, a dancing demo group of musicians and dancers, was on hand, and rightly also wanted to take their turns interacting with the children.  Baron Stephan of Cambion taught a group the Tangle Bransle and later, we got an adult couple to join us for Gathering Peascods.  We danced a good many exhibition dances, I pavaned around by myself a few times, and I got one little girl to just skip with me around the maypole in time to the music.

Definitely, we were better off for having a dance band and dancers.  Lady Patricia and I could have managed a little on our own, but the overall demo was greatly improved by the richness of the sound and the variety of dances.

The children picked up the simple dances readily enough (Tangle Bransle is single right, single left-left-left, all in a chain), but were also more than happy to just move in time to the music.  It's all one to them, so long as they get to run around. Dances that are easy to add dancers to were great, because people would see the group dancing and want to join in.  The exhibition dances drew attention, but nobody wanted to jump in with us - it looked too hard.

 

And a side note:

Everyone expected ribbon dances!  I can't say I'm surprised, since that's what I expected before I started the research on this thing.  I'm afraid that sharing the fact that the ribbon weaving was Victorian disappointed a few people.

 

Conclusions

 

• Dancing + singing = bad idea.  Singing the choruses was all right, but trying to dance everything and sing everything just did not work.  Maybe for slower dances, or for someone in better cardiovascular shape.  (My mom always said that, when you were working out, you should be able to talk but not to sing.  As always, Mom was right.)
• The demo atmosphere, with small numbers of onlookers drifting in and out with other things to see and do, was not the best atmosphere for dancing.
• Dances that were easy to pick up and easy to add dancers to were best for the demo environment, when audience participation was sought.
• Line dances are even better than circle dances, since you can do them with as few as two (one Scadian plus one audience member).
• Exhibition dancing draws attention (good) but doesn't necessarily spur interaction.  Still, that's true of fighting as well, which is usually the big draw at demos.  Alternating exhibitions with participatory numbers worked pretty well.
• The "maypole as community activity" did not happen to the degree that I had envisioned it. But we did get some people to dance with us and have a good time.
• It might work at an event.  Scadians might be somewhat more motivated to participate in the full-on caroling aspect of it; we're predisposed to think that sort of thing sounds cool and medieval.  The general public was a little more wary of it.
• I think it could work at a demo, but as a "Maypole at 12" sort of thing - time blocked out, people gathered in, as opposed to trying to lasso them in while they're wondering if they can make it to the Disney booth before they run out of Narnia T-shirts.
• Dances are not too hard for kids to learn.
• But  we can also do "impromptu choreography" as needed, leading lines in any simple combination of left-rights or skips, to any music.  Chances are excellent that's what early carols looked like (McGee, Medieval Instrumental Dances).

So overall: Not the stellar period experience I was hoping for, but also not bad for a first try. Kind of a pity it's seasonal and we'll have to wait for next spring for another go.

Maypole: D-Day

That is, Dancing Day.  Today, we do the maypole.

Of course, it's raining and I have a cold.

But on the plus side, local musicians/dancers Three Left Feet are planning on coming, so we will have more musical/dance support. 

Stupid cold.

Maypole: Documentation

Finally. There's the first draft, anyhow. It may well be the last draft.

I'm not going to write the Conclusions and Future Work before the actual performance. It might be well and good to conclude what I've learned about Tudor pastoral poetry (not much, really) or about adaptations of existing work (a little) but my real goal is to learn about getting groups of non-experts to dance, sing and have fun. I am not going to have any real results, conclusions, or ideas on what to do next until the performance part of this performing arts project has occurred.

In comparison, if I were a garb A&S sort of person, I wouldn't make any conclusions until I'd worn what I'd sewn up, saw how it hanged on a real body, how it breathed and moved. A cook isn't going to be finished until she's tasted the dish and can evaluate it. If this were a poetry project, I might consider it done - but it's not, so I don't.

Maypole: Documentation

Yes, it is still ongoing. Documentation is, for me, one of the hardest parts of a project. The fun part is done, and I want to move on to the next thing! But I'm stuck rewriting stuff I've already done into a form that can be understood by a random passerby. Not so much fun, but necessary if the project is going to be of any use to anyone but me.

Maypole: Documentation

Documentation continues apace.