Scottish country dance

A Scottish Country dance (SCD) is a form of social dance involving groups of couples of dancers tracing progressive patterns according to a predetermined choreography. Although Country dancing is often considered a type of folk dancing, its original base of dancers was from the more educated and wealthy classes of the Renaissance.

When it first became popular around the 18th century it was as a shorter, quicker form of dance that was a light relief from the more courtly dances normally danced. Derived from early British forms of Country dancing, SCD is related to English country dancing, contra dancing, cèilidh dancing, Old time dancing and Irish set dancing due to the combination of some of these dance forms in early Country dance forms and later cross-over introduced by their overlapping influences via dancers and dance masters.

Scottish country dancing (a social form of dance with three or more couples of dancers) should not be confused with Scottish highland dance (a solo form of dance). There is a certain amount of cross-over, in that there are Scottish country dances that include highland elements as well as highland-style performance dances which use formations otherwise seen in country dances, but these are relatively few when the two dance forms are considered each as a whole.

Country dance

A country dance is any of a large number of social dances of the British Isles in which couples dance together in a figure or "set", each dancer dancing to his or her partner and each couple dancing to the other couples in the set. A set consists most commonly of two or three couples, sometimes four and rarely five or six. Often dancers follow a "caller" who names each change in the figures.

Introduced to France and then Germany and Italy in the course of the 17th century, country dances gave rise to the contradanse, one of the significant dance forms in classical music. Introduced to America by English immigrants, it remains popular in the United States of America as contra dance and had great influence upon Latin American music as contradanza. The Anglais (from the French word meaning "English") or Angloise is another term for the English country dance. A Scottish country dance may be termed an Ecossaise. Irish set dance is also related.

Characteristics

The term "country dance" may refer to any of a large number of figure-dances that originated on village greens. The term applies to dances in line formation, circle dances, square dances and even triangular sets for three couples.

Scottish

Scottish usually refers to something of, from, or related to Scotland, including:

See also

Country Dance

A country dance is a social dance form in which two or more couples dance together in a set.

Country Dance may also refer to: