Sword Movements in Scottish Highland Dancing: Part 1

Video Transcript

"You can contact me at michiganhighlanddance.com and in this clip I will be talking about and demonstrating the history of the sword and the basic movements of the sword dance. The sword dance is also a traditional Scottish Highland dance. The sword dance was typically done in battle and it was done either before the night before battle where the Scott's men would put down there swords and cross them a dance the sword and if he touched his sword that means that he would have a horrible day in battle the next day and probably wouldn't come back alive. But, if he danced victoriously over his sword he usually would have a great day in battle the next day. Another story kind of about this was that the Scott's men did a after battle using his opponents or defended enemies sword and he cross his sword with his enemies sword and dance a sword around it. Now I'm going to talk about some of the basic movements that I use in sword dance. The first movement that I'm going to talk about is pretty much the movement that is used throughout the entire sword is called the pa de bas. Now there is three different version of the pa de bas we would do. The first version is called the extended pa de bas. When you do the extended pa de bas your arms are going to be in first position throughout the whole thing that you will do this. You will extend your working foot to second arrow low and you will spring over onto that foot and place your left foot or the other working foot in third position on the half point. You will then beat the back foot up and down finishing with the extension of the left foot to second arrow low. The counting of this would be 1 and 2 and you would execute these in series of pa de bas and you will do these only on the first step of the sword and a couple of these in a row would look like this."