Hornpipe

The dance is performed in hard shoes and the sound is the substance of it, made by toe taps, heel drops, shuffles and rapid trebles worked into the dotted rhythm. Weight is carried high over the ball of the foot with the supporting leg strong and the free leg crossing and beating; steps travel little, since the interest is vertical and rhythmic rather than spatial. The Irish competitive form holds the upper body erect with arms at the sides, while the older theatrical sailor version uses the arms for mime and the English clog version keeps them loose and low. Accents fall on the long note of the dotted pair, which is what gives the hornpipe its characteristic rocking swing.

A solo dance in essentially all of its traditions. Irish and Highland competition forms are danced alone in front of judges, sometimes with several dancers on the platform at once but not interacting, and the theatrical sailor's hornpipe is a single-performer turn.

The hornpipe is one of the standard hard-shoe dances at Irish feiseanna under the major governing bodies, danced at set competition tempos with fixed step counts, and it appears in Highland competition as one of the national dances. English clog competitions at folk festivals also use hornpipe tunes as the standard accompaniment. Judging in all of these turns on rhythmic accuracy, clarity and carriage rather than on travel or elevation.

Irish hornpipes are the most codified, danced slower and heavier than reels with elaborate treble work. English clog hornpipes stay lower and closer to the floor, with intricate sound patterns and minimal upper-body movement. The Highland sailor's hornpipe keeps the mimetic gestures and adds Highland technique with turned-out legs and pointed feet, and the older triple-time hornpipe survives mainly as fiddle repertoire rather than as living dance.

The belief that the hornpipe originated as a shipboard exercise is a nineteenth-century image rather than a documented practice, and the mime that supports it comes from the theatre. It is also wrong to assume hornpipes are always in 4/4; the older English form is in triple time and predates the duple one. Finally, hornpipe and reel are not interchangeable — the dotted rhythm and slower tempo are the whole distinction.