The dance The Opera appears in the book A New Academy of Compliments Or, The Lover’s Secretary, printed in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1795, which contains dance descriptions on four of its 144 pages. There are a couple of odd things about its appearance in that book. For one thing, it appears twice in the book, with two different descriptions, two pages apart, that seem to be describing the same dance. For another, it seems to be based closely on the dance The Opera, or The Ape’s Dance that appears in Playford’s Dancing Master as far back as 1675, and also appears in a dance manual from 1719.

(The 1719 dance manual is The Second Book Of The Compleat Country Dancing Master by John Walsh, which was published in London, as was Playford’s book. The version it has of The Opera is identical to the version in Playford except for a few typographical differences (1st instead of 1., 2d instead of 2., ’till instead of till, sett instead of set, many more words capitalized), so I won’t mention it again.)

I’ll give you the directions for how the Wayside Inn Steppers dance it first, and then give you the explanation of why we dance it that way.

The Opera (Duple Minor Longways)

• A1 First couple cross the set. The first Gent does a two hand turn to the left halfway with the second Lady while the first Lady does a two hand turn to the right halfway with the second Gent. All face partner and fall back, then come forward.
• A2 First couple cross the set. The first Gent does a two hand turn to the left halfway with the second Gent while the first Lady does a two hand turn to the right halfway with the second Lady. All face partner and fall back, then come forward.
• B1 Double figure eight, starting with the first couple crossing down through the second couple’s place while the second couple casts up and then crosses down. This ends with all four dancers back where they started the figure.
• B2 All Back To Back with partner, all set to partner, the first couple casts down one place while the second couple moves up.

Footwork: We use pas de bourrees for this dance. In particular, the fall back in A1 and A2 is one pas de bourree, as is coming forward after it.

Here is the sheet music:

Here is the tune for you to listen to:

If you want to know where the interpretation above came from, read on.

The directions for the dance Opera, or The Ape’s Dance in Playford’s book The Dancing Master start with Honoring the Presence (basically saluting the distinguished person sitting at the top of the hall), then describe a progressive longways dance for as many as will. The description in Playford is confusing, but there is enough similarity between it and the dance described in 1795 to suggest that the 1795 dance was based upon the dance described in Playford. (For a danceable interpretation of the Playford dance, including a music file at the recommended tempo for that version, see https://colinhume.com/instr.htm#Opera.)

Here are the directions, copied from the 1698 edition:

Honour to the Presence. Lead up forward and back. That again.

First Man and 2. Wo. change Places, then 1. Man and 2. Wo. and 1. Wo and 2. Man take Hands/ and walk round till you have just changed Places; then fall back, then all four cross over in each/ other’s Places, then take Hands and do the same thing again, and at the second crossing, the Men take/ Hands with your own and put back, then Right-hands to your own, and Left to the other Wo. then/ 1. Man go down behind the 2. Wo. and the 1. Wo. in the middle, then Man up in the Middle, and/ the Wo. up behind the Man, then Sett to each other and cast off. So to the bottom.

Here are the directions for the dance The Opera from A New Academy of Compliments, or, The Lover’s Secretary, printed at Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1795, page 140:

First couple change sides ; first man and second/ woman take hands, turn half round; second man/ and first woman do the same, both couple falling/ back cross over, turn hands again upwards, cross/ over again, second couple do the hay, then right/ and left back to back.

And here are the directions for The Opera from page 142 of A New Academy of Compliments:

Change sides; the first man takes the second wo-/man by both her hands, and turns her half round,/ second man and first woman do the like at the same/ time, then both couple fall a little back and cross/ over, do this over again till you come as you were,/ then both couple do the hay, right and left, back/ to back, both couple set, first couple casting off,/ and next leading up, ends the dance.

The first section of each of these descriptions have some significant differences. The Playford description starts off by saying that the first man and second woman change places, while the other two have the first couple changing places with each other. The version from page 140 of New Academy seems to have the first couple changing places three times in the first part of the dance, while the version from page 142 has them crossing over twice. However, even though different words are used to describe the movements, they are similar enough that it seems likely that they are trying to describe the same movements.

So that you can judge by yourself, here are the descriptions from all three, movement by movement (P=Playford, Q=New Academy page 140, R=New Academy page 142).

P First Man and 2. Wo. change Places,
Q First couple change sides
R Change side

P then 1. Man and 2. Wo. and 1. Wo and 2. Man take Hands and walk round till you have just changed Places
Q first man and second/ woman take hands, turn half round; second man/ and first woman do the same
R the first man takes the second wo-/man by both her hands, and turns her half round,/ second man and first woman do the like at the same/ time

P then fall back
Q both couple falling back
R then both couple fall a little back

P then all four cross over in each/ other’s Places
Q cross over
R and cross over

P then take Hands and do the same thing again
Q turn hands again upwards, cross over again
R do this over again till you come as you were

While these descriptions are not identical, it seems possible that the 1795 writer of the New Academy of Compliments was looking at a copy of a late edition of Playford or of Walsh’s 1719 manual and trying to come up with a workable interpretation of the dance in that book.

After this first figure, the 17th century version and the 18th century versions diverge. Playford has the Gent going down behind the Ladies’ line while the Lady goes down the center, then the Lady comes up behind the Gents’ line while the Gent comes up the center, then they set and cast off. The two versions from 1795 both have hey, right and left, and back to back – but there is a problem with the hey that has to be solved.

The version from page 140 of The New Academy of Compliments says, “second couple do the hay”. Since we would expect a hey to be done by at least three people, this seems wrong.

The version from page 142 says, “both couple do the hay”. We could take this to mean that the two couples do a hey for four, except for one thing: we don’t know for sure if heys for four as they are done now existed in the 18th century. The dance manuals from the 18th and early 19th century that have diagrams of the path of a hey that we have seen (Wilson 1808, Dukes 1752, Welch 1767) show a hey as being a hey for three people dancing on one side of a longways set. This suggests that a hey for four people moving across the line of the set might not have existed at the time.

On the other hand, this is not the only dance description from the 18th century that refers to two couples doing a hey. For example, the dance As Quick As You Please (from Walsh, 1719) says, “The 1st and 2d Cu. go the Hey, which brings the 1st Cu. into the 2d Cu. Place proper”. In fact, there are dances with two couples doing a “Hey” (such as Hit And Miss and Parsons Farewell) all the way back to the first edition of Playford in 1651. For more information about the history of the Hey figure, see Colin Hume’s essay at https://colinhume.com/hey.htm

With our dancers we tried out the dance both with a hey for four and with a double figure eight, which does seem to have existed at the time. (Colin Hume has a discussion of Playford dances which seem to contain a double figure eight on his website. You can see that discussion at https://colinhume.com/defigure8.htm) Our dancers decided that the dance both looked and felt better with a double figure eight, and that is what we decided to use.

That left only one more issue to be resolved. The figures of the dance as we’ve interpreted them require 40 bars of music. (Perhaps someone else will come up with a different interpretation. We’ve included all of this detail to help make that possible.) The tune (as printed in Playford) is only 32 bars long.

The tune Opera Reel is old enough that it could be the music which was intended in 1795, but it also is a 32 bar tune. This could be resolved by playing the tune with an extra repeat (either AAABB or AABBB in the case of the tune The Opera, or AABCD in the case of Opera Reel), but in spite of our desire to do 18th century dances as close to the way they were originally done as we can, in this case we have decided to shorten the dance by leaving out the Rights and Lefts. There are so many 18th century dances that contain Rights and Lefts that we are sure we won’t miss them.

Thank you to Adrienne Rusinko of the Princeton University Library and to Richard and Tracey Powers for their help providing information for this article! And thanks to Colin Hume for his research.