Tim McDaniel, in the SCA Daniel de Lincoln, 16 June 2017
For as many couples as will.
| Phrase | Steps | Beats | Picture | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | Take inside hands. Both 2 doubles forward (or 4 pive). | 8 | |
A doble trace. After the end of the trace, |
| A | Split. While A does 1 double forward and full-turns outward in 1 double, B does 2 doubles backwards. | 8 | |
the first 3 forth and torne, whill the last retrett. |
| A | Rejoin, in mirror image. While A does 2 doubles backwards, B does 1 double forward and full-turns outward in 1 double. Meet and turn face to face. | 8 | |
Then the last forth and torne, whill the first retrett; |
| B | Both do 1 double backwards. | 4 | |
and then both retrett ethir from oder. |
| C | A kicks 3 times. | 4 | |
Then the first a flowrdelice, |
| C | Then B replies by kicking 3 times. | 4 | |
the second anothir. |
| D, D | Zig-zag to meet: both 1 double forward angling left, then 1 double forward angling right. Meet and take inside hands. | 8 | |
Then ethir contrary othir 3 singlis on the left syd and then come togeder. |
| E, E | Both single forward, single backwards, and full-turn away 1 double. | 4 + 4 | |
Then trett and retrett and torne. |
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. I shamelessly stole their reconstruction, and even the notion of their table of steps with musical phrases, the original text, and diagrams of dancers. Their main page is at http://rendance.gyges.org/, for the Ontario Renaissance Dance Guild.
This dance is called both "Sofferance" and "Sofferancz" in the Gresley manuscript. Only the steps are given in the manuscript, so Emma and Martin composed a tune. Their rendition is two times through. The MP3 can be downloaded from their main page; that rendition repeats the dance two times.
It may be best to have the caller and someone else be a spotter on the side of the dance. For one thing, this has a "split", as Gresley dances sometimes do: different people do different things at the same time. If the caller also dances, people unfamiliar with the dance may sometimes follow the caller's actions, even if they are dancing the other position. For another, it's simply harder to track and correct dancers if they're doing different things.
After the three kicks + three kicks, Emma and Martin specify coming together by turning left to double forward, then turning right to meet. That felt a bit awkward to us: for one thing, we backed too far apart for that maneuver to allow us to meet. So we found it better to zig-zag with two doubles to meet.
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/sofferance.html.
A ZIP file of all my Gresley instructions is at http://www.panix.com/~tmcd/dance/gresley/gresley.zip.