Allemande

The body stays upright and quiet, with weight carried forward over the travelling foot; the three steps are even and unhurried and the lift on the fourth beat is small, more a raising of the free leg than a hop. Partners hold inside hands at about waist height and match stride exactly, since the whole file depends on consistent spacing. Floor pattern is simply up the hall and back, with the turn at each end taken without breaking the hold; the closing section adds light springs on the same step pattern.

A couple dance danced processionally. Partners face the same direction for almost the entire dance and never work across a set or exchange with other couples, so the partnering is a matter of matching stride and hold rather than of figures.

No competitive form exists. It belongs to early-dance and early-music revival, where it is taught in Renaissance dance workshops and danced at reconstruction events and historical balls. The interpretive questions concern how the step is timed and how fast the closing section runs, and these are settled by argument among reconstructors rather than by any judging body.

French description gives a plain repeating processional; English almains include named fixed choreographies within the Inns of Court sequence of measures, with their own step counts and floor patterns. Instrumental sources across Europe carry pieces titled almain or allemande whose relationship to any danced version is often unclear.

The single most frequent error is confusing this dance with the allemande movement of the Baroque instrumental suite, which is music that inherited the name after the dance had gone out of use and was not danced. A second confusion is with the eighteenth-century allemande, a turning figure in which a couple interlaces raised arms and revolves, found inside cotillons and contredanses and connected to the emergence of waltzing; that figure shares the name and nothing else.