The Circassian Circle

How The Circassian Circle is danced

1. All join hands, into the middle for four steps and out for four. Twice.
2. Women into the middle, clap, and back out. Men do the same, turning to face their partner as they come out.
3. All swing their partner, finishing facing round the dance.
4. Promenade 16 steps anticlockwise.

You do not need to memorise any of this. Garry walks the room through every dance before the music starts and keeps calling all the way through it — the steps are here because some people like to read ahead, not because anybody is expected to arrive knowing them.

What it needs, and who it suits

Formation

One circle containing everybody, partners side by side facing in. There are no sets, no threes and no counting — if you can get the room into a ring, you can dance it.

Music

Steady reel or jig time with a very obvious eight-bar structure. The music does most of the calling.

The room it needs

Needs a clear circle, which means it is the one dance that genuinely prefers a square or round room to a long thin one. In a very long room the ring turns into an oval and the middle section loses track of the centre.

For beginners

The easiest dance here alongside the Gay Gordons, and better for a nervous room because you are one of eighty rather than one of two. Four steps in, four steps out, and you are already dancing.

Where it falls in the night

First or second, and it is the dance we reach for when a room is large, shy, or full of guests who have plainly never done this before. Everybody is in the same circle, so nobody can be visibly wrong.

What usually goes wrong

• The circle collapsing inwards. After going into the middle everybody has to come properly back out, or the ring shrinks a little each time until there is no room to swing.
• Losing your partner in the swing. In a big ring it is easy to end up swinging the wrong person — no harm done, but finish facing round the dance or the promenade goes backwards.
• Promenading the wrong way. It travels anticlockwise. One couple setting off clockwise in a ring of eighty is very visible.

Where it comes from

Danced across Britain and Ireland rather than being exclusively Scottish, and the name has nothing to do with the dance's origins in any way anybody has convincingly established. It survives because it solves a real problem better than anything else: how to get a hundred strangers dancing at once.