Halloween Triad

Fried Herman published Halloween Triad, set to John Kirkpatrick's tune Jump at the Sun, in 1984 in her volume of dances titled The Naked Truth. Others later picked up the tune for different choreographies (Rich Jackson's Look Both Ways, for instance), recognizing its driving force and good energy for dancing. A second dance by Fried with Halloween in the title followed in 2002: The Bishop's Halloween, set to two tunes by the hugely talented tune smith Jonathan Jensen. A video of that dance is also on the Childgrove YouTube channel.

In her later publications, Fried came to see how helpful it was to indicate in the dance instructions when a skip change or skipping step was called for. In her early publications, however, she rarely mentioned what stepping to use, thinking that it would be obvious to experienced dancers or that teachers would provide guidance. And so, while the instructions for Halloween Triad are silent about the stepping, it gave me great pleasure to see the dancers skip change the opening solos for 1W and 3M.

Equally pleasurable was the exciting music provided by Karen Axelrod, Eric Martin, and Doug Creighton, whose music that 2019 weekend at the Lenox Assembly was incomparable.
--Paul Ross