Ly Bens Distonys de Duobus (Gresley; "long" choreography by Gaita)

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

As many couples as will.

Phrase	Steps	Beats	Source
A	Take inside hands. 2 doubles forward.	8	After the end of the trace,
B	Split. Drop hands. While A does three singles forward and then a half-turn single, B does three singles backwards (and does not turn).	8	the first 3 forth and torne, whill the second retrett 3 bake.
	Double to meet left shoulders and take left hands.	4	Then come togeder
	Exchange by left hands into each other's place. Then drop hands, and B half-turns in no time to face forward.	4	and ethir torne into oders plas.
B	NOTE: The B section over again, but with dancers A and B switching roles, to wit:
	Split. While B does three singles forward and then a half-turn single, A does three singles backwards (and does not turn).	8	Then last man 3 forth and torne, whill the first retrett.
	Double to meet left shoulders and take left hands.	4	Then come togeder in such wys as they ded afore
	Exchange by left hands into home places. Then drop hands, and A half-turns in no time to face forward.	4	and ethir end into their own plas.
A	Take inside hands. Both take one step forward and one step back. Drop hands and full turn single outward (A turns left, B turns right).	8	Then trett and retrett and torne.

Source

An introduction to the Gresley dances is in 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. Their main page is at http://rendance.gyges.org/, for the Ontario Renaissance Dance Guild.

The dance is variously titled Lybens Distonys, Ly Bens Distonys, or Lubens discuneus. It may refer to Libeaus Desconus, "a 14th-century Middle English version of the popular 'Fair Unknown' story. ... The story matter displays strong parallels to that of Renaut de Beaujeu's 'Le Bel Inconnu', ..." (from Wikipedia's Libeaus Desconus, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libeaus_Desconus, as of 24 March 2017).

Ly Bens Distonys has both tune and steps in the Gresley manuscript. Unfortunately, as written, the tune and the steps don't match (unless the trace has no music or a full repetition of the tune). Something has to change.

So there are two common versions in the SCA, often called "long" and "short".

Short

The "short" version is from the "More Dances from the Gresley Manuscript" page mentioned above. The home page has a link to their MP3, and their instructions are in the PDF "Gresley notes from KWDS X".

Their version keeps the music as written by altering the steps, by dropping the "and ethir torne into oders plas" bits. Instead, each person doubles back directly into the other's place. They happen to do the trace as a pavane (single, single, double).

Long

This is the "long" version by Gaita, who have a page at http://www.gaita.co.uk/. It's on their CD "Eschewynge of Ydlenesse: Music for Dancing - from the Middle Ages and Renaissance" by Misericordia & Gaïta. You should order both the CD and the booklet -- they are separate purchases. The dance has seven (7, yes, 7) times through the music.

Gaita keeps the steps by adapting the music, by doubling the middle phrase of the music. They interpret "3 forth" and "3 bake" as three singles (step, close, step, close, step, close), but "come togeder" as a double (step, step, step, close).

Personally, I tend to think that when Gresley refers to "3 singles" or other similar figures, it's referring to a double. Otherwise, there would be a lot more dances with singles in Gresley than in other styles of dance. But if we did that here, we'd end up with two chunks of 4 beats with no step. But on the other hand, the Gresley manuscript does have a few uses of the term "doubles": was he actually using two different terms to mean the same thing?

I (over-)specify taking and dropping hands. Those are just flourishes that my group tends to do, so they are entirely optional.

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/ly_bens.html. A ZIP file of all my Gresley instructions is at http://www.panix.com/~tmcd/dance/gresley/gresley.zip.