gigue

A lively dance, probably of British origin, popular during the 17th–18th-c. The dance was popular with lutenists and became a standard movement in instrumental suites of the period. It appeared in the stage works of Lully and his contemporaries.

The gigue or giga is a lively baroque dance, usually in a compound metre such as 6/8, 6/4, 9/8 or 12/16.

As a musical form, gigues frequently occur as movements in binary form in larger works such as concertos and sonatas.

Writers during the baroque era distinguised French and Italian gigues, and occasionally the gigue anglaise. The Italian and French forms seem to have derived from the British jig which was danced at least as far back as the 15th century and is a common ancestor of modern folk dance jigs.