Gypsy Dance Move

4 comments

• I would like to address the huge number of inaccuracies in this cast. I have done pretty extensive research on this subject, as it is something of great importance to me. To sum, Martha Wild called in about a beginner dancer who visited a contra dance and complained about our use of the word gypsy to describe a dance move, without any knowledge of the contra culture, history or anything. Since then, this has exploded into an absolute frenzy in the contra community that has divided what has always been a welcoming and warm community.

  First – maybe it comes from a different origin. I stated this. It is known for a fact that gypsy, along with several other moves in contra, were borrowed from Morris dancing. We do not know a lot about the origins of Morris dancing because nothing was written down, it was an oral tradition. We are fairly certain that the origins were either from the Moors or from the celts. There are strong relations to pagan ritual dances, especially surrounding such events as May Day and such. So, I looked into both languages. First, Moors. Moors are arabic. Arabic was easy, I have about a dozen Arabic students in my class. So I asked them. They do have words that sound like both gyp and gypsy. Gypsy means gypsum, highly unlikely. Gyp means pocket. Again, not overly likely to describe this move. So, then I turned to celtic. Celtic origins are hard to track, so I looked at modern languages and found gyp in Welsh, meaning gaze or glance. THIS IS WHAT THE MOVE IS (despite what people may tell you, it IS NOT WALKING AROUND YOUR PARTNER, it is looking at them). So, yes, it is true that the g in Welsh would be a hard g, not a soft g as we use it now. However, the first time that gypsy was written down in a contra dance or a Morris dance was in Cecil Sharp’s book in 1909. He wrote down words that the dancers of that time were using. Were you around in 1909? I know I wasn’t. So, we don’t really know how they pronounced it in 1909 do we? Maybe they pronounced it with a hard g. I am not “reaching”. I am making the point that this word most likely originated from a Morris word, which seems to be celtic in origin (not Romani – more on that later). Cecil Sharp diagrams, describes and uses both gyp and gypsy (interchangeably) in a dance that he calls “Hey Boys, Up We Go”. Ironically, he changed the name of the dance. This dance originated in the 1400s and was called Cuckolds All Awry. It was written down in the 1600s by Playford, but Playford did not use words in his book, so we have no idea what words were used to describe the move at that time. Is it possible the name was applied to the move later? Sure. But the dance pre-dates the arrival of the Romani in England.

  Gypsy was first used in the late 1500s/1600s in England to refer to the Romani people because they thought they were Egyptian, the word originates from the latin word for Egyptian. But Morris dancing and contra dancing in England is from at least the 1400s, which predates the Romani. So these dances DID NOT come from Romani traditions. Morris is likely celtic. English country dancing was a very common dance in England and contra evolved from that as a type of dance that more common folk could do.

  The Romani do in fact use the word gypsy to refer to themselves – A LOT. The representative of the Romani Society that was contacted about this (who is in fact not Romani) has written a book wherein she uses the word gypsy more than 90 times in just the first few pages. Romani refer to themselves as gypsies all the time. Some proudly claim to be gypsies. Gypsy jazz was invented by a Romani. There is an Association of Gypsies. There is as much of a split among the Romani about the use of the word gypsy as there now is in contra dancing!

  You mention that the American Heritage dictionary refers to the word as “often offensive”. You conveniently leave out the other three definitions of the word: A member of various traditionally itinerant groups unrelated to the Romani. One who follows an itinerant or otherwise unconventional career or way of life, especially – a part time or temporary member of college faculty and a member of a chorus line in a theater production. In complete, inaccurate information.

  Words change over time, in different cultures and in different contexts. Gypsy no longer refers to just Romani people. It refers to any migratory person.

  You ask what about the hundreds of years before. Well, unfortunately all that is lost to time. Very little is written about contra because it was a common folk dance and most people did not write. Playford made an attempt to record the dances in the 1600s, but he uses a tremendous amount of shorthand and does not use the name of moves. Cecil Sharp and his colleagues attempted to revive country dancing in the early 1900s and did very extensive searches in England and the Appalachias to find groups that still did the dances. He recorded the dances with the words he used, and he recorded gypsy. Of course we don’t know when the word originated, but we do know that one particular group of Appalachians had remained very isolated and were very English in nature, and so the word originated before they came to America.

  The move does not in fact mean to walk around your partner. There are related moves, such as gypsy star and gypsy chase where you do not walk around your partner at all. The move is looking at your partner – gazing at your partner. Do I have solid evidence that it came from a celtic origin? No, that is not possible since it was never written down. Do I feel that is pretty strong compelling evidence, yes I do.

  I do find it disturbing that it seems almost transparent that you were rapidly trying to do research on this subject while you were talking and as a result missed a lot of information.

• Actually, my comments are based on very extensive research, not assumptions. I started researching this when it first came to the contra dance discussion in October. I have references. I have a lot of information. AND I know for a fact that people who move around a lot are in fact called gypsies, or refer to themselves as gypsies, because I LIVED THAT LIFE. I had no home as a child. We moved constantly. We were gypsies. I always considered myself a gypsy. So, imagine my surprise when two weeks ago I learned that not only have I lived a gypsy life, I do in fact have gypsy blood. When I learned that, I did even more research. Where did these people come from? What was their migratory path? Why did they leave India? And even more – where did they come from before that? I traced their origins back to the STONE AGE! Guess what? Romani are more closely related to Europeans than they are to the rest of India. Don’t tell me I don’t know how to do research. I have a freaking PhD. All I do is research. And they are wrong, very wrong, on many of the comments that they made.

  And Gypsy Jazz does not just honor Django – he invented it.

• Sunday’s NYT has an article describing the Catalan gypsies of France. the negative connotations usually ascribed to the Roma do not seem to be applicable to this group. It is apparently well established that the two groups are unrelated. Does this affect the benign (?) use in dance or other non-derogatory applications of the word? Do the Roma have the high ground because of their prevalence?

• I’ve grown up with “woah”, but now that I know the correct form I’ll change it. That’s the boat that most people are in, just misinformed. Not stupid, not “arrogantly-ignorant”, not a part of a “dumbed-down” world, they just didn’t know that one spelling was wrong, and the other right. It’s just an issue of a misspelling of a word being (tragically) introduced into the mainstream, nothing to get your panties into a twist.