That’s right – a line dance for three couples. Now, if you do the dance in the SCA, you’ll notice that it is generally done as a circle dance for as many couples “as will,” meaning however many couples are interested.Ĭheck out the 3A edition’s write up on how the dance is done: I screamed (with glee) so loudly that I got in trouble at work.
In 2014, a friend of mine was doing research there and gave me a real, “Hey, kid – you wanna buy a sundial,” moment when he texted me the title page and the Sellenger’s Round page of the 1657 edition of the dance. It’s always the last place you look, isn’t it? Apparently, it was hiding in the University of Glasgow archives. We knew that it existed, but couldn’t locate a hard copy of it. For the longest time, the 3A Edition of the Playford Dancing Master books was something of a unicorn.
I would like to include a little side note here.
Reseaches? Yea, let’s pretend that’s a word and go with it. It’s just delightful, and I feel myself getting giddy just thinking about it.Īnyway, the history of Sellenger’s Round became somewhat my baby. I adore yelling out the “Stompity-Stomp!” part of the dance. I couldn’t resist the smug look that I gave him, and the fact is, that was me – likely at Kingdom’s Crusades, where I (and my co-dance master, of the time) taught the ball on a regular basis. He told me that he had once seen it taught differently down in Atlantia, where a small woman was teaching with a man in Elizabethan, and they yelled out, “Stompity-Stomp!” instead of telling people do “double forward” at the start of the chorus. This differed from my variation slightly, as I taught a similar step which was more of a regional variation than it was an accurate representation of the original text. He was teaching Sellenger’s Round, and had a different way of doing the chorus, which, to be completely fair to him, was taught as the dance was written. I would say that the year was somewhere in the mid-2000s. This happened to me while I was attending the dance class of a dance master who I highly respected, but who (apparently) didn’t know me by name. It used to be said that you know you “made it” in the SCA if someone told a story about you to you – and didn’t know it was you. I love teaching it as much – if not more – than I love dancing it. Sellenger’s Round – as anyone who knew me during the 15 years that I was an active dance mistress will tell you – is my all time favorite dance. I understand that I left off in sort of a weird place last week, and that is because the research that I did for Sellenger’s Round was extensive.
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