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Issue 2372: Jean Milligan

Object
Jean Milligan (Person)
Submitter
Stephen Webb (SJW)
Assigned to
Anselm Lingnau
Priority
Normal
Disposition
Ignored
Description

Please add to Areas of Activity

Collector of Dances

I feel this should be recognised as an important part of the development of SCD. I clearly recall Jean Milligan telling us how she came to collect the dance The River Cree. I have recorded the story in The Reel Today, we think of dance devising but we should remember that many early dances were either collected by researching old manuscripts or by word of mouth and being written down. And alongside standardising dance steps this was one of Miss Milligan’s greatest contributions to SCD. Many thanks

Previous Actions

  • Date  March 14, 2021, 9:52 a.m.
  • User  Stephen Webb (SJW)

New issue submitted

  • Date  March 14, 2021, 11:24 a.m.
  • User  Murrough Landon (murrough)

Assigned changed to »anselm« (previously »None«)
Disposition changed to »Needs help« (previously »New«)

Hello Stephen.
At the moment the database only has four possible categories for area of activity: deviser, composer, musician, publisher. So what you suggest is not currently possible for the editing team to do.

Anselm has recently started an upgrade of the database software so I am assigning this issue to him for his consideration.

Personally I do agree that actively collecting dances people remembered doing in the past does seem a separate category from subsequently publishing them (in possibly adapted versions). Though I imagine only a very few people were really doing this (eg the Fletts?) compared with the thousands of devisers, composers, etc in the database. So I can also see a counter argument that perhaps just keeping this in biographical extra info may be enough. Cheers, Murrough.

  • Date  Dec. 22, 2022, 5:40 p.m.
  • User  Anselm Lingnau (anselm)

Disposition changed to »Ignored« (previously »Needs help«)

The database does not track who “collected” a dance, and the total number of “collected” dances as a percentage of the overall repertoire (most of which has been written by known entities, with a minority of dances reconstructed from old sources) isn’t big enough to warrant adding that relationship to the data model explicitly – only a small number of individuals actually qualify as “collectors”.

Just to be clear, as far as I’m concerned, interpreting a dance description in a 18th/19th century source does not count as “collecting”. You “collect” a dance if you watch people doing it “in the wild” and write it down. This is something that a few people did in the early days of the SCDS – besides Miss Milligan, Ion B. Jamieson comes to mind, another one of the early heroes who have been all but written out of the official history books of the Society – but not something that is done a lot today, and in any case an activity that led to the inclusion of probably less than 1% of the current repertoire of more than 20,000 dances.

Given that the database isn’t going to acquire “collector” as an area of activity, I’m closing this issue for good. If somebody was a notable collector of dances that can always be mentioned in “Extra Info”.