New Hampshire Old-Time Country Dance Web Site

Petronella

The way that Petronella is danced has changed significantly at least three times during that the past 50 years or so. The opening figure is the most complex part of the dance. To start the dance the active gent in four steps turns over his right shoulder (clockwise) to end up below his starting position, in the center of the set facing up. At the same time the active lady turns similarly to end facing down in the middle of the set, roughly between the starting positions of the first couple. A common call for this figure is "round to your right".

Once in position the actives then balance to their partner. Then the figure “round to your right and you balance” is repeated three more times, with the actives going a quarter of the way around each time, to end up roughly opposite where they started for the second time, and by the fourth time back on their own sides.

Now, the first fork in the dance begins here. Ralph Page said (Northern Junket, Vol. 10 No. 2, 1970 and An Elegant Collection of Contras and Squares, 1984) that the closer you got to Vermont the more likely they were to reverse the order and dance it as “balance and turn a quarter”.

The contradance revival in the early 1970s brought about further changes in the dance. Dudley Laufman talks about the actives taking hands during the balance, and even twirling under their joined arch. I have seen that done myself. Then one night a set of dancers got the inactives to join them, making a diamond for the balance. The inactives would go around the diamond with the actives. This became very popular quite quickly. When I started dancing in the late 1970s we would sometimes start with just the actives dancing, and then part way through the caller would tell the actives to join in. Some dancers still preferred not to invite the inactives to join them. Within a few years it was nearly always danced with the inactives participating. Dudley refers to that version of the dance as Citronella.

The last major change took place in the 1990s. People started to clap in each “round to your right”. There were two claps in the second half of the figure. ""Round to your right" takes up two measures, or 4 beats. If you count those beats as one-and-two-and-three-and-four-and, the claps are on "and-four". That also caught on quite rapidly, although there are still quite a few people (including me) who dislike it. It appears to be somewhat less pervasive than at first, but is still fairly common.

After the four times through that figure the actives go down the center and back, cast off, and the final figure is rights and lefts. These figures have remained unchanged.

There have also been changes in the music used for the dance. It comes from the Scottish dance of the same name, done to the tune of the same name. In the Northern Junket Ralph Page wrote, “Neither did we ever dance it to the tune named "Petronella". All of the good fiddlers knew that particular time and most of them heartily disliked it. We dancers went one step further — we despised it! The commonest tune in southwestern New Hampshire to do the dance to was "Girl I Left Behind Me", with "Finnegan’s Wake” a close second. The nearer you got to Vermont the surer you were to dancing "Pat'nella" to this tune.” The tune he presented is what we now call Green Mountain Petronella. Although Dudley used Petronella on the Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra recording, he has said many times that those tunes were often used, and named some others as well.