jig, dance of English origin that is performed also in Ireland and Scotland. It is usually a lively dance, performed by one or more persons, with quick and irregular steps. When the jig was introduced to the United States, it was often danced in minstrel shows. In instrumental music the gigue, the successor to the jig, was used by Bach and Handel in their suites.

The jig (Irish: port) is a folk dance type as well as the accompanying dance tune type, popular in Ireland. The jig derives its name from the French word gigue, meaning small fiddle, or giga, the Italian name of a short piece of music much in style in olden times. It was widely played as a dance tune at Irish fairs, and from the music the dance took its name.

The "Irish Jig" is a popular tune-type within the traditions of Irish dance music, second only to the reel, and popular but somewhat less common in Scottish country dance music. It is transcribed in compound meter, being 6/8 time (six beats to the measure, the eighth note getting the beat). The most common structure of a jig is two eight-bar parts, performing two different steps, each once on the right foot, and one on the left foot. As with most other types of dance tunes in Irish music, at a session or a dance it is common for two or more jigs to be strung together, flowing on without interruption.

Light Jigs

Light jigs are, the fastest of the jigs, danced in ghillies, and are performed in 6/8 time. The performer’s feet rarely leave the ground for long as the step is so fast. There are several light jig steps, varying with each dance school, but one step is almost standard in all light jigs. This step is known as the rising step, or the rise and grind. This is the right side version of it: Put your weight on your left foot and lift your right foot off the ground. Hop on your left foot once. Hop on your left foot again, bringing your right foot back behind your left foot and then shift your weight onto your right foot, leaving your left foot in the air. We use the phrase "hop, hop back" for these three movements, and there is a slight pause between the hop, and hop back. The next movement is a hop on your right foot. Then you sift your weight on your feet , left-right-left-right. The phrase for this whole movement is: "hop, hop back, hop back 2-3-4." To do the step on the left foot, reverse the left and right directions.

Slip Jigs

Slip jigs are performed in 9/8 time. Because of the longer measures, they are longer than the reel and the light jig, with the same amount of bars to the music. The dance is performed high on the toes, and is often considered the "ballet of Irish dance" because of its graceful movements that seem to slip the performers acress the floor.

Single Jigs

Single jigs, or hop jigs are the least common of the jigs, performed in ghillies, in a 6/8 or less commonly a 12/8 time. This type of jig is not widely found at feisanna across the United States, but it's more common in Europe.

Treble Jigs

Treble jigs are performed in hard shoes, and also to a 6/8 time meter. They are charachterized by stomps, trebles, and clicks. Many set dances are performed in treble jig time, a few being Drunken Gauger, Blackthorne Stick, The Three Sea Capitains, and St. Patrick's Day.

References

http://www.streetswing.com/histmain/z3jig.htm

http://www.nonvi.com/sm/footwork.html#irish

Wajig is a simplified front end to Debian's package management tools including dpkg and APT. Wajig provides the functionality of apt-get, dpkg, dpkg-deb, apt-cache, and other tools, by launching these tools as a subprocess. Wajig also provides extra functionality beyond that of the stock apt and dpkg tools, for example, the command wajig sizes provides a listing of all installed packages and the amount of disk space they require, from smallest to largest.

The key reason to use wajig is that it provides a consistent and intuitive interface to all packaging commands. Under the surface it maps commands to the appropriate apt/dpkg commands. The apt/dpkg command line interface can be confusing and lacks an orthogonal or intuitive quality to the user interface.

wajig also provides a package install and removal log. This log provides an audit trail that can help an administrator discover the package install that subsequently broke things.

Wajig is written in Python and is licensed under the GNU General Public License. There is also a GUI version included called gjig that provides buttons for most of the commands.

Gjig

Gnome-jig (gjig) provides a GNOME interface to JIG.

External links

• Wajig Overview
• Debian's wajig package
• JIG (consisting of wajig and gjig)
• moving from rpm to apt using wajig