Issue 683: Mairi's Divorce

New issue submitted

Of course we keep it!

There is devisor, a publication, a diagram, and a crib assigned to this entry. We cannot just remove dance entries just because the dances share a certain similarity. Keeping all the MW discussions in mind, you want to have a way to add this dance to programmes if you want to explicitly state the right shoulder variant.

And if you remember James Cosh - there is no right shoulder variant of Marie’s Wedding allowed. Thus, you need it as a separate dance ;)

I was tempted to set it to “ignored”, but leave it to someone else ;)

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

For a variety of reasons¹ I’m not a huge fan of “Mairi’s Divorce”, but I agree with Heiko that this dance has enough of an independent existence that we can’t simply get rid of it because it is too much like Mairi's Wedding, or because we don’t like it.

Personally I’m hoping that people won’t decide to put this dance on programmes just because they prefer right-shoulder passes for the dancing couple in the half reels of four. It may not be ideologically pure to dance right-shoulder passes when the programme says “Mairi’s Wedding”, but if it happens it is not the end of the world either, and some people actually prefer the left-shoulder passes (I know I do). Nobody is being served by pushing “Mairi’s Divorce” as a new dance in order to make the right-shoulder passes official (it would instead just sic the dance police on those who do that dance “wrong” by passing left shoulder), and as far as I’m concerned the dance can sit in the database and grow moss.

¹ It’s not just that the dance is a blatant and unnecessary rip-off of James Cosh’s choreography, but also that its title is incredibly disrespectful to Mary C. MacNiven, the historical person to which the original song, Mairi’s Wedding, was dedicated, because she apparently was a very loving wife and mother and never actually divorced her husband (in fact, he predeceased her by some considerable time and she never remarried).