Reel

Travelling is done with a light springing travelling step, the weight kept up and the path curving continuously as dancers pass alternately by right and left shoulders. Setting steps are danced on the spot with elevation and turned-out legs, and this is where technical display lives — the Highland setting steps involve beats of the free foot against the supporting ankle and calf. The upper body stays erect and the arms are held either at the sides or raised, depending on tradition, with no leaning into the direction of travel. Irish competitive reels are danced in soft shoes with high, quiet leaps and pointed feet, so that the effect is buoyant rather than percussive.

A set dance rather than a couple dance in its original form: the classic Scottish reel is for four dancers, or three, who interweave as a group and have no sustained partner hold. There is no closed hold at all in the traditional forms, though dancers may take hands briefly for a turn. The Irish competition reel is danced solo.

Reels are danced competitively in at least three living systems. Irish feiseanna include the reel as a standard soft-shoe dance at prescribed tempos, Highland competitions under the Scottish Official Board of Highland Dancing include the Highland Reel and the Reel of Tulloch, and Scottish country dance events run team and demonstration competitions in which reel-time dances feature heavily. Cape Breton step dancing sustains a separate percussive reel tradition with its own competitions and gatherings.

Scottish reels emphasise the set structure and Highland setting technique; Irish reels are faster, denser in step material and largely solo in the competitive tradition. Cape Breton preserves an older percussive style of reel step dancing, close to the floor and tightly tied to the fiddler. In New England and the Canadian Maritimes the reel figure lives on within contra dance as the hey, while the tune type became the backbone of American old-time fiddle repertoire.

The Virginia Reel is not a Scottish reel; it is a longways country dance of English derivation that acquired the name, and it uses different figures. Reel also gets used loosely as a synonym for any fast fiddle tune, which obscures that it names a specific even-eighth-note rhythm distinct from the jig's compound time and the hornpipe's dotted swing. And a reel is not simply a fast strathspey played up to speed; the rhythmic character is fundamentally different.