Webfeet: The New Mrs Arrowsmith

Webfeet Home Up Search Help

The annotated New Mrs Arrowsmith

An architypal eCeilidh dance; loads of movement, loads of room for improvisation. Square sets. The original dance was for 32 bar hornpipes but there is a variation which works for 48 bars.

The original:

A1:

A2:

B:

The second part of the dance is a 'Moving star', something more complicated to describe than do...

How does this feel? Well, if you feel you are drawing lines on the floor rather like a spirograph, you are probably getting it right. Everybody is moving all the time and and you just have to trust that, as you head to your place, your partner will also be magically heading towards it.

For the men when you are doing the left hand turn with your partner and have made sure they are heading their right hand star, you are naturally turning for the cast out. It is angular momentum. It just flows. Enjoy it :-)

And then once you've got the figure right, you can start throwing in some variations.

The 48 bar variation:

For the 48 bar variation (from Fee Lock), there is a grand chain at the beginning with the rest of the dance the same. 48 bar tunes have A, B and C parts.

A:

B:

C:

Variations

The dance lends itself to variations. It is possible, depending on the music to have deliberately short forward and back in the A1, just go one bar in and one back, then you have time to squeeze in a swing when you get back home. (Quite possible to the Chalktown tune, maybe not for others...)

An alternative is to do a right and left through (in the place of the forward and back)

On the left hand turn, instead of the man putting the woman back into the star, turn a little faster and go one-and-a-half times round. It is then the man who puts his right hand into the star and the woman does the cast round to the left.

More information

Origins

Music:

See also:

Navigation: [ Home ] [ Index ] [ Overview ] [ Site Map ] [ Translate ] [ Up ] [ What's New ]
Mail: mgk@webfeet.co.uk, 2005/11/08
URI: http://www.webfeet.org/eceilidh/dances/the-new-mrs-arrowsmith.html
Keywords: orgwebfeetmmx, webfeet, dance, folkdance, barn dance, eceilihd, ceilidh, the new mrs arrowsmith