SCA Dance Cheat Sheets

Hole in the Wall

Source: Playford (1695), LoD v1, TPB.

Setting: A longways set of couples.

Version: 1.0

A perennial SCA favorite: hated by musicians, demanded by dancers, used to raise money at Pennsic, with the musicians willing to pay to avoid playing it.

 1- 4  First couple casts off around twos, leads up the middle back to place.
 5- 8  Second couple casts up around ones, leads down the middle to place.
 9-10  First man and second woman change places,
11-12  second man and first woman change places,
13-14  All hands halfway round.
15-16  Ones cast down while twos lead up the center to progress.

The couples dance in pairs, with the couple closer to the music being the ones, and the couple farther away being the twos. The dance repeats with the twos moving up the line and the ones moving down. When you reach the end, wait out one cycle and then come in as the other couple.

As for the music and origin of the dance, Justin says the following in the Letter of Dance article:

I checked with my favorite source of dance arcana --- Baron Patri ---
and got the following chronology for Hole in the Wall. Between the
ninth (1695) and tenth (1698) editions of The English Dancing Master,
there appeared an addendum, called The Second Part of the Dancing
Master.  Some copies of this have an extra sheet, which contains HiTW
as well as a few other dances. By the 1698 edition of The Second Part,
HiTW was in its main text, and it finally got into The English Dancing
Master proper with the eleventh edition (1701). --- Justin