Armynn de Tribus (Gresley; tune and choreography by Emma Dansmeyla and Martin Bildnet)

Tim McDaniel, in the SCA Daniel de Lincoln, 16 June 2017

Three dancers in single file, called Front (F), Middle (M), and Back (B). NOTE! This dance is very syncopated. Only one person per set moves per call, unless it says "All".

Phrase	Steps	Beats	Source
A	All 4 doubles forward (or 8 pive).	16	a doble trace
B	Back doubles backwards.	4	after the end of the trace: the last 3 bak,
B	Middle doubles backwards.	4	the medle oder 3 bak,
B	Front doubles backwards.	4	the first oder 3 bake.
C	Front 1 movimento. (Any small two-beat movement: up on your toes and down, for example.)	2	Then the first move,
	Middle half-turn single.	4	the second half torne;
	Middle 1 movimento.	2	the second move,
	Back half-turn single.	4	and the last half torne;
	Back 1 movimento.	2	the last move
	Front half-turn single.	4	and the first halfe torne.
D	Back two doubles forward.	8	Then the last 6 singlis forth,
D	Middle two doubles forward	8	the meddist as mony to hym.
E	Front single forward, single back, full turn single	8	Then the first trett, retrett and torne as he standeth.
F	All bransle left, all bransle right	8	Then brawle al at onys on ways; and ayen the oder way.
	All hey. A standard hey for 3, except (1) all start facing the same direction, (2) all start at the same time, (3) Front and Middle make an arch for Back to go under. Back peels left to pass between Middle and Front, while Middle follow-the-leader on Back, while Front goes left and curves in to meet Middle ...	16	Then every man at onys change places.
	... as Front meets Middle, they take left hands and form an arch and do a full circle. Back finishes his loop of the hey and goes under the arch while Front and Middle keep circling to home ...	16	whil the first torn the second abought
	... and Back pivots to face front, and everyone's back home in their original orentation.	0	then the last man thruth with a torne

Source

My source is Emma Dansmeyla and Martin Bildner, "More Dances from the Gresley Manuscript", Known World Dance Symposium VII, http://rendance.gyges.org/content/seven_gresley_dances/KWDS_VIII_Notes.pdf. The introduction describes the Gresley (or Banys) manuscript. Their main page is at http://rendance.gyges.org/, for the Ontario Renaissance Dance Guild.

The booklet I used isn't on that page, but a version is in their "Gresley notes from KWDS VIII". I shamelessly stole their reconstruction, and even the notion of their table of steps with musical phrases, the original text, and diagrams of dancers.

Dance

The main difficulty in teaching is that the hey is a lot easier to do than to teach.

The MP3 on Emma Dansmeyla and Martin Bildnet's page is the one we dance to. It goes through the dance twice. Our version is close to Emma and Martin's instructions. The group modified it to feel more natural to us -- but obviously opinions may differ on that point.

Gresley dances have a substantial relationship to Italian 15th century Renaissance dance. (Two Gresley dances are cut-down versions of known Italian Ren dances.) "A doble trace" is plausibly a sequence of pive that starts so many Italian dances of the period, and Emma specified 8 pive. The group I'm in tends towards the old, tired, and fat, and they have little liking for Italian Ren in general and pive specifically. So we usually change two pive to one double, as here, for a trace of 4 doubles.

Emma and Martin have the hey starting with the opposite handedness, meaning that Back turns to the right, Middle follows the leader by curving from the left, and Front starts to the right. For us, for some reason, Back starting bransle left - bransle right - turn left just felt more natural. Maybe it was the influence of English country setting and turning? Regardless, just like if someone starts a hey in an English country dance the other way (for example, in a mirror hey), you can adapt by going the other way. Here, it's easy, if everyone watches which way that Back starts moving.

Our version:: Back starts left, and therefore Front starts left too, Middle and Front meet passing left shoulders, and therefore have to take left hands.
Emma and Martin's version:: Back starts right, and therefore Front starts right too, Middle and Front meet passing right shoulders, and therefore have to take right hands.

The amount of time the arch is held differs from dancer to dancer. Sometimes, Front and Middle take hands only after passing, so they arch only during the last half of their turn.

Copyright 2017 by Tim McDaniel, tmcd@panix.com.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The URL for this page is http://www.panix.com/~tmcd/dance/gresley/armynn.html. A ZIP file of all my Gresley instructions is at http://www.panix.com/~tmcd/dance/gresley/gresley.zip.