Logo Wheatley - Greensleeves

The one remaining dance in the book that hadn't been well and truly Cymrucised by 1995, was the profoundly awful Oh, Dear, What Can the Matter Be? The tune and title were unspeakable and the dance eminently suitable for ritual purposes, since it could be regarded as fun for neither participant nor spectator.

The answer was a number of adjustments which completely transformed the dance, exciting approbation and opprobrium in equal measures, which can only be regarded as a thumping endorsement.

Music
The tune had to go. Luckily, one of the very best morris tunes in the cotswold cannon is not much used because it's a jig tune, so we appropriated the minor-key Greensleeves which normally accompanies the Bacca Pipes Jig. Unlike the other Wheatley dances, there is no OTY, as the musician is encouraged to meander through the song tune once before bursting into the dance tune proper with two firm notes.
Foot Up
Unlike all the other dances, Greensleeves doesn't lend itself to the standard snappy intro because the dance and the tune commence simultaneously (and you can't get much sharper than that). A full-length foot-up is, therefore, preferred.
Chorus
It was a nice easy sidestep chorus until some lunatic demanded to know why we had to turn our backs on the audience all the time. The result is a chorus turned inside-out. The set re-forms at the end of the preceding figure with each side of the set facing outwards. With open sidesteps throughout, each side takes four steps to the right and four back to the left followed by two right and two left.

The treatment of the remaining two bars of B music depends entirely on the figure which follows. In the case of hey or double-hey, the dancers caper out and then in to place; where any other figure follows, the dancers caper out and then caper again on the spot.

Finish
At the end of the chorus following the double-hey, the dancers caper out and stay out, forming a very wide set facing up. For the first four bars of the A music, they single step and for the second four bars caper. During the course of these last four bars, the bottoms come together and caper up the set, picking the middle pair(s) up with them as they go until, before the final bar, the whole set is in line abreast and ready to dance the last caper together.
Figures
  1. Foot Up (song-tune intro, full-length figure)
  2. Hey
  3. Rounds
  4. Double Hey
  5. Caper-Up finish

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© Cardiff Morris 1996