Country dance

A country dance is any of a large number of social dances of the British Isles in which couples dance together in a figure or "set", each dancer dancing to his or her partner and each couple dancing to the other couples in the set. A set consists most commonly of two or three couples, sometimes four and rarely five or six. Often dancers follow a "caller" who names each change in the figures.

Introduced to France and then Germany and Italy in the course of the 17th century, country dances gave rise to the contradanse, one of the significant dance forms in classical music. Introduced to America by English immigrants, it remains popular in the United States of America as contra dance and had great influence upon Latin American music as contradanza. The Anglais (from the French word meaning "English") or Angloise is another term for the English country dance. A Scottish country dance may be termed an Ecossaise. Irish set dance is also related.

Characteristics

The term "country dance" may refer to any of a large number of figure-dances that originated on village greens. The term applies to dances in line formation, circle dances, square dances and even triangular sets for three couples.