Gracca Amorosa is a popular cascarda found in Caroso’s manual Il Ballarino (1581). Like many of the 16th century Italian repertoire, it has a certain level of complexity in both footwork and vocabulary, but its strong verse/chorus structure makes it easy enough to pick up with some practice.
I first became aware of the dance at Pennsic, where I saw it danced many times over the course of the war. Not knowing the steps myself, I didn’t get a chance to do it myself until my new friend Adele took pity on me and dragged me through it. I struggled to follow along, often getting completely lost and only finding my place again when I heard the familiar tune of the “bouncy bouncy bouncy boing” chorus.
When I returned home, I spent a long time alone with the music, practicing the steps one verse at a time. Eventually, I got it figured out and was able to teach it to others so I could have someone to dance with. When the time came to teach a formal class on the dance, I decided I should go back to the original source and make sure the reconstruction I was using was as close as possible to the original. One of the common problems I’d had with the dance was getting too far away from my partner during various parts of the dance, and I looked at the original choreography with an eye toward fixing that problem.
Caroso’s descriptions of the individual steps (both in Il Ballarino and Nobilta di Dame) were fairly precise, and following them more closely tightened up the floor pattern of the dance considerably. What puzzled me, however, was the use of the ripresa. In the chorus, the two dancers move away from each other with two flanking seguiti spezzati, which, if done as described, do not move them very far apart at all (spezzati are usually done in the SCA much larger than described). The dancers come back together with three riprese and a trabuchetto, which, when done in the manner commonly seen, covers an awful lot of ground. This discrepancy led me to investigate the ripresa more closely.
Caroso describes two steps: the ripresa grave and the ripresa minima. The former is the “step over a brick” figure commonly done in the SCA. The latter involves sliding both heels to one side, then sliding both toes to catch up. It is a much smaller step, though somewhat more difficult to do, especially in rubber-soled shoes on carpet. In all of his choreographies, Caroso never mentions which of the riprese to use; each is defined based on how much time it takes to do. Apparently, Caroso assumed that it would be obvious which step to use in each dance, or perhaps that it would be clarified by an actual teacher.
This question led me to perform a closer analysis of step timing as described by Caroso. Based on this, it seems that the ripresa minima is the correct step to use, not just in Gracca Amorosa, but in all cascarde. When the dance is done using smaller steps and the ripresa minima, it takes up a very small amount of space indeed.
The other side effect of smaller spezzati is that the dancers do not go around enough to switch places when doing two spezzati in the wheel in the first verse (or go all the way around when doing four in the second verse). However, since the dance is done as a single couple not in any particular relative position to anyone else, it doesn’t matter how far around they go. SCA dancers are used to going halfway (or all the way) around in these sorts of figures from English country dance, I think, and have tended to adjust their steps when doing this dance to meet that expectation.
The class handout I developed from this research can be found here.