The Ponderosa Pine, a triple time longways duple minor, appears in Fried Herman’s final volume of dances, Serendipity. Set to the tune Ashworth by Anita Anderson, it is an accessible, uplifting dance, whose title evokes the love that Fried Herman had for nature and all its beauty.
Composed in 1998, the dance was featured on the Friday night party program at the 2006 Fried-for-All Northwest in Seattle, a weekend organized by Judi Rivkin, with the composer Anita Anderson sharing keyboard duty with Laurie Andres, and joined by Dave Bartley, mandolins and guitars; Betsy Cooper, flute; and Sande Gillette or Claude Ginsburg, violins. For this video, the sublime music is provided by Karen Axelrod, Eric Martin, and Doug Creighton.
What are the keys to dancing The Ponderosa Pine well? One is to realize that the set contracts and expands in the first A music; that is, as the half R-hand stars are formed, corners come closer to make the hands across comfortable, drawing the set in a bit. Then, during the L-hand turns on the sides, the men step outside the line of the set to make the turn round, which opens the set up. Thus the set “breathes,” contracting and expanding rhythmically, which is part of the dance’s beauty.
“Covering” or “spotting” is part of good dancing, that is to say, matching your moves to those in the general set, up and down the line, not just in your own minor set. In The Ponderosa Pine, the opportunity to spot is right there in the second A music as the dancers set back in lines, hands joined with neighbor, and then turn single to place. I like the men to enter this setting back with a polite turn coming out of the final L-hand turn in the A1; the momentum feels right for the setting back.
I have occasionally heard that after the gypsy left with neighbor in line, it is awkward for the women to execute the turn single R as the men meet at the top of B1. You’ll notice that the women in the video move smoothly into the turn single because they don’t look back at the dancer with whom they did the left-shoulder gypsy but move directly into the turn single. Fried calls this “an impolite gypsy,” in contrast to the usual “polite gypsy,” which ends facing the one you do the move with.
My thanks go out to the dancers of the Lenox Assembly and to the musicians, all of whom worked hard to bring this dance alive and who succeeded so well in doing so. -Paul Ross
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