Capering & Kickery: Recent Episodes
None
A bit of Halloween silliness and a reminder that dance reconstruction is a broader field than one might think:
"Halloween dancing parties are much in vogue at present, and a quaint device for arranging partners is still observed, in country places, and, in modified form, in cities..."
I admit, I had never particularly associated cabbage or kale with Halloween, so I was a little bemused when I came across the design at left for a Halloween card. Cabbage? Kale? Really?
Apparently it all goes back to "Auld Scotland", and since I'm in Scotland (again), I'm willing to look at a supposed Scottish tradition:
"The lads and lassies in "Auld Scotland," in the olden time of "Kaling," (hunting for kale or cabbage stocks) went, blindfolded, into the garden on Halloween, and each was expected to honestly bring back the first stalk grasped in the darkness. A thrifty well-formed stalk promised the finder a comely partner for life; a dwarfed or crooked one just the reverse. A bit cut from the top of the stalk indicated the temper of said partner, sweet or bitter as the searcher after destiny chanced to secure a sample. If much earth was found clinging to the root, the finder would be rewarded by riches; but if bare, poverty would be his portion."
So far this is a standard fortune-telling method. But no, wait, in 1891 America it's actually...a sort of cotillion, in the dance party game sense? A method for picking dance partners? Why not...[more kale and cabbage behind the cut]
And now for something a little bit different: not quite a ghost story, but a story of a dream of ghosts dancing "The Dream Ball" was published in Aunt Judy's Magazine (London), Volume IV, Issue III, in 1885, the last year of its run. The author was S. D. Spicer, about whom I know absolutely nothing.
"The Dream Ball" tells the story of the highly imaginative "Duchess" Paulet, a thirteen-year-old history buff who, on a birthday excursion, finds herself alone in the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), where she eventually falls asleep leaning against a plaster replica of the Apprentice Pillar from Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland. In her dream, the carriages in the museum come to life and collect people from the paintings to take them to a ball held outside of time, where people from different centuries meet and dance together. The author bragged in a note at the end that all the paintings and objets referenced in the story could be found in the museum, and, indeed, the descriptions of some of them are detailed enough that it's possible to identify the specific works. I'm not going to attempt to do all of them, but I'll give a few quick examples....[several behind the cut]
A lengthy description of a Grand Fancy Ball in aid of the Public Charities held on Monday, March 25th, 1844 was published in a Supplement to the Liverpool Mercury on March 29th, 1844. When I say lengthy, I mean that it started out with around 1500 words of self-congratulation and description of the charities involved in rather purplish prose along these lines:
Liverpool has for a long period been famed for the multiplicity of its noble public institutions, having for their object the amelioration of the condition of its poorer inhabitants, the relief and cure of their bodily ailments, and the supplying of their temporal wants, without regard to party, creed, or colour. The benevolence which suggested and the generosity which has hitherto supported asylums wherein the sick, the maimed, the blind, the houseless, the stranger, and the starving could find temporary care, succour, and shelter, cannot be too much commended; and we feel persuaded the exertions thus made by those who "have enough and to spare," have been amply repaid, not only in their secret consciousness of having performed a Christian duty, but in the earnest and heartfelt aspirations of those who have, by their kindly aid, been snatched from the jaws of death,--of those whose fevered brows have been gently fanned by the refreshing breath of charity,--of those whose prostrate limbs have found strength and activity in places founded by benevolent hands, and of those who, devoid of the common necessaries of life, have had their most pressing wants supplied.
For those not counting, that paragraph consists of exactly two sentences, the latter of which contains over 140 words. To make an extremely long story short, the ball was in aid of the Liverpool Infirmary, the Northern and Southern Hospitals, the Dispensaries, and the District Provident Society, all very worthy institutions. I'll be quoting and paraphrasing extensively from the Mercury article, but I will be skipping over the rest of the charity descriptions in favor of information about the ball itself....[building stuff and costumes and all behind the cut]
I have a special treat this month that I've been saving for almost a year. Last December, I was able to attend the astonishing exhibit Fashioned by Sargent at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The exhibit paired paintings by John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) with actual clothing of the period for comparison, including many of the actual items worn in the paintings. This was heaven for a costume person like me! The clothing and artwork were each astonishing individually. But being able to compare clothing side by side with Sargent's paintings of it made it obvious how much Sargent tweaked the look of things and how cautious one should be using paintings as a source to reconstruct costumes. I spent several hours in the exhibit just staring intently at everything. And to add dance historian rapture to costume rapture and art rapture, two of the costume/painting pairs were of fancy dress costumes!
I took extensive photos, but I am not the world's best photographer, nor is my camera all that special. And the lighting in the exhibit was kept low to protect the paintings and textiles, with lots of little sparkly indirect lights that twinkled oddly off the protective cases in which the costumes were displayed. All of this adds up to photos which are not the greatest quality, but which I hope will communicate the beauty of the garments and the excitement of comparing them to the original paintings. There are much better lit photos of some of the paintings and clothing on the exhibit website, a couple of which I have borrowed for this post....[click through the cut for some amazing costumes and paintings!]
Dennison's Bogie Book was a series of Halloween decoration and party guides published by the Dennison Manufacturing Company, whose primary business was paper products (including plain crepe paper and a variety of specific decorative items) beginning in 1909 and continuing near-annually for at least a couple of decades. The contents are somewhat hilarious by modern standards, but one has to admire the creativity of the company's marketing staff in adapting paper products for everything from table decorations to hats to entire costumes.
The original books are collector's items now, and quite expensive, but several of them are freely available online.
The 1919 edition, whose cover is shown at left (click to enlarge), features a whole page of "Innovations for the Dancing Party" on page 26. Some of them are quite clever while some are quietly horrifying in a grimly amusing way. But if you want to put on a Halloween dance in the style of the late 1910s, there are enough tidbits here to make it work. The rest of the book is also a helpful guide to decorating a room or a refreshment table, making party hats for one's guests, and creating invitations. There's even a short ghost story. I'm just going to stick to the dance-specific parts, but the entire book may be seen at Hathitrust for those who wish to delve into the rest of it....[Halloween dance party games behind the cut]
The turn-of-the-twentieth-century etiquette book Twentieth Century Culture and Deportment, or The Lady and Gentleman at Home and Abroad by Maude C. Cooke (Philadelphia: National Publishing Company, 1899) devoted part of a chapter on artistic home decorations to the "cozy corner". The construction and decoration was described in some detail:
Have your carpenter make a double right-angle bench, with a high, straight back. The seat must be two and a half feet wide, and the top of the back five feet from the floor. This now looks like an ungainly three-sided square, or rather oblong, for it is better to have one side somewhat longer than the others. The wood should be stained cherry or oak, to match the other furniture in the room, and oiled and polished so as to be smooth and of rich appearance; or, use hard wood, black walnut, ebony, mahogany.
The seat and inside back may be thickly and prettily upholstered, and then piled high with pillows, or, the wood having been nicely finished, the upholstery may cover the seat only. Be sure and have the seat made low, otherwise the Cozy Corner will be uncomfortable, its name will be belied, and no one will hie to what might have been the favorite seat in the room...
...The seats should be piled with sofa pillows, and in the inclosure a few hassocks would not be found amiss.
The purpose of the cozy corner?
The word cozy suggests warmth and pleasantry, as well as comfort. Therefore, this corner is always by the fire, and those occupying it are presumably cheery and happy.
It is just the place to rest in, just the place to read in, just the place for you and your dearest friend to chat in, just the place to play a game in, as bags, balls, etc., could easily be tossed from one seat to the other; just the place to lay plans in, for you are in no hurry to move, and so your plans, not being hurriedly completed, would be more apt to prove satisfactory; just the place to nap in, just the place to frolic in. Indeed, just the place to add to our already comfortable homes if we would have them one remove nearer the ideal home than they now are.
(quotes from pp. 479-80; the entire book may be found online at Project Gutenberg)
This being a dance history blog and not a nineteenth century home decor blog, one might wonder why exactly I find cozy corners worthy of attention. Oddly enough, at least in early twentieth century Maine, they seem to have sometimes formed part of the decorations at college dances...[actual cites behind the cut]
Let's get the important part out of the way first:
The Highland Mazourka is not a mazurka.
It is, however, a delightful example of the nineteenth-century tendency to transpose dances from one time signature to another. In this case, typical polka mazurka sequences have been transposed from 3/4 time to 4/4 time with a bit of extra hopping added to fill out the music, which should be of the Scottish strathspey style. The polka mazurka itself consisted partly of polka (2/4) steps transposed to 3/4 time. Confused by all these shifting time signatures? Fear not; all will be made clear below...[behind the cut]
I was expecting to spend July quietly at home, but it looks like I'll be making a quick DJing-and-research trip to Boston before returning home to prepare for my trip to Scotland in August...[Bluesy links behind the cut]
I've written a great deal about recorded variations for the foxtrot in its early years. It can be hard to locate all these posts or to navigate them using subject categories. So, by request, here is a "mothership" post indexing all of my foxtrot material, sorted into categories in what seems to me to be the most useful way and in chronological order within the categories. I'll continue to add to it as I write new posts on the foxtrot or find other ones that I had not properly tagged or that are useful in dancing early foxtrot.
Enjoy!
[long list of posts behind the cut]
Twelve years ago, I wrote a brief post explaining how to dance "La Russe", a redowa/mazurka variation I found, like so many others in M. B. Gilbert's Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) and [George] Washington Lopp's La Danse (Paris, 1903)....
Summer is a-coming in, and it's likely to be hot. I want to spend my time in nice, cool libraries doing research instead of hot, sweaty dance spaces with no air conditioning! I'll be DJ'ing in the Boston area early this month and spending at least five days reading in various libraries. And doing yardwork. Lots and lots of yardwork. Sigh. Stay cool...[Djing details behind the cut]
I'm going to start off May with a long trip to England to teach and call at a folk festival and then do some research in London, where the British Library is finally semi-functional again after last autumn's cyberattack. I have a lengthy "shopping list" of sources to look at and a list of museum exhibitions to visit while they are paging them!
After that, and April's travel insanity, I'm going to spend the rest of the month at home recovering and hopefully catching up on processing and cataloguing my research photos all the way back to February...[Hey Days link behind the cut]
A contemporary image of the White Dove shown in traditional weeping modeThe recent rediscovery of detailed documentation of the famous White Dove ritual dance has finally enabled dance historians to effectively locate it within the long tradition of syncretic miming dances tracing back to the well-documented branle subgenre of sixteenth century France and perhaps best considered in light of the later tradition epitomized by the early nineteenth century French chicken dance (La Poule), as suggested by its subtle incorporation of the pas de basque setting step.
Careful evaluation of the elaborate sequences of the dance and the skill required to mesh them with the irregularly structured traditional music that has been handed down to us indicates that this was no amateur social dance. Performance of the ritual was likely limited to a dedicated corps of acolytes who underwent significant training and rehearsal prior to public performance in specially designed costumes, culminating in the metaphysical liberation of the soul, as symbolized by the release of white doves at the climax of the dance and the subsequent embodiment of the dove via the emulation of the motion of its wings by the corps.
While it is generally accepted that the tune of the White Dove dance originated in the Netherlands, the international transmission of the performing arts is evidenced by the undeniable fact that the first known lyrics were written in English, and the surviving documentation of the dance is associated with a rendition in Spanish. As the lyrics and the complex code concealed within them and the symbolism of the Weeping Dove have been extensively analyzed elsewhere, and the details of the traditional costumes are beyond the scope of my studies, I will focus here on the practical performance of the elements of the dance and the required sequence matched to the music. The dance elements may be divided as follows:
- the marching sequence, having both regular and extended versions
- the jumps to the left
- the arming sequence
- the Embodiment of the Dove...[details behind the cut]
April is going to be fun! I'll be heading to Chicago to run dance workshops and a ball for a Regency-themed LARP and an evening of 18th and 19th century French dance, to Massachusetts for the New England Folk Festival (NEFFA), and then down to Staten Island (NYC) for an 1824 Lafayette Ball. I don't put library days on my schedule, but I'll have time this month at both the New York Public Library and the Newberry. In between I'll try to keep catching up on cataloguing material from previous library trips...[event links behind the cut]
Long, long ago I published a reconstruction of the Lambeth Walk, from the musical Me and My Girl, as demonstrated on a 1938 newsreel film by British Pathé. At the time, I mentioned that the newsreel version did not actually match the directions published on the 1937 sheet music (the cover of which is shown at left; click to enlarge) and promised to talk about other versions of the dance at some point. Having just had the chance to teach the Lambeth Walk last weekend for the first time in ages, it seems a good time to get back to it!
Before reading on or trying the dance, I suggest reading my post on the 1938 version and watching the British Pathé video (the Lambeth Walk starts at about :54) to get an idea of the spirit and style and links to some recordings. This is not an elegant dance; it's a meant as a jaunty working-class strut. Oi!
The starting position for the dance is side by side, gentleman on the left and lady on the right. The starting foot is probably the right foot for both dancers, judging from the poor-quality photos accompanying the instructions, but it doesn't actually matter at any point in the dance.
Dancers should start at the lyrics "Anytime you're Lambeth way...[different version and comparisons behind the cut]
March is...Massachusetts month! Two trips to Boston (well, Cambridge and Concord) for DJing, researching, and teaching a weekend of waltz and more, plus an online lecture for a Lowell group. Woo hoo!...[Massachusetts things behind the cut]
Not having any more convenient descriptions of cotillion (dance party game) figures with leap year themes in books of such figures, I have to take them where I find them -- in this case, in a description of a society leap year ball attended by no fewer than seven foreign ministers of different nations held in Washington, D. C., on March 24, 1892. The ball was described briefly in The New York Times on March 25, 1892. The majority of the short article is taken up by lengthy lists of all the important people who organized and attended the event, but in between, there is a description of a cotillion figure. Interestingly, it was led by two couples simultaneously, from "opposite ends of the hall".
Dancing was general until 9:30 o’clock, when the cotillion began, led from opposite ends of the hall by Miss Richardson with Mr. William Slack and Miss Stout with Mr. Clifford Richardson. In the selection of the favors the greatest ingenuity had been exercised, and the laughter-provoking devices were highly satisfactory.
Perhaps, sensible of the number of people attending, they were actually running two cotillions in parallel?...[a simple cotillion figure and a long list of names behind the cut]
An elaborate upper-class leap year ball was held in Fall River, Massachusetts, on Friday, February 21, 1896, as reported at great length in the Fall River Daily Evening News the following Monday. Fall River is quite close to Providence, Rhode Island, and this ball had a number of similarities to the leap year ball held in Providence four years before, though it does not seem to have featured an enormous cotillion.
On the organizational side, the committee was entirely female, as were the eleven "active and efficient" floor managers. As in Providence, the receiving line consisted entirely of male patrons, each holding "a bunch of beautiful roses" and "a small fan". There was no mention of them curtsying, alas, only smiling.
While not emphasized in the writeup the way it was for the Providence ball, gentlemen other than the patrons had been gifted with flowers as well:
Most of the men had been provided by their escorts with boutonnieres, and many of them carried also bunches of flowers and fans. Corsage boquets [sic] were not infrequent adornments of shirt fronts.
This may have been expensive for some of the ladies:
Every one of them brought at least one man, and one or two brought half a dozen. ...[many details, including the dance program and sad male wallflowers, behind the cut]
Despite the role reversal mandate at leap year balls, it's still difficult to find examples where the role reversal extended into actually calling or otherwise leading the dancing. While I have several mentions of female floor managers, it's not clear whether they were leading the dancing or just assisting a male caller or prompter. One of the few clear examples I'd found previously was two ladies leading a cotillion, at a leap year ball held in Providence in 1892. So I was beyond delighted to find two mentions of female callers in short blurbs about leap year balls held in Idaho and Kansas in 1896...[female callers! and musicians! behind the cut]
Before getting back to detailed newspaper descriptions of leap year balls, here's a less detailed but still useful description of one in the form of a very mediocre poem. It was published on page three of the Oakdale Leader, in Oakdale, California, on Friday, February 14th, 1896.
The leap year elements mentioned specifically in the poem are:
- the ladies "managing" things and taking the author into the ballroom
- the "beaux" sitting in a row waiting for partners and the ladies rushing to find one, making sure no one was left out
- Fannie and Julia as some sort of ball organizers or floor managers, wearing badges and making sure things went smoothly
- a lady acting as treasurer and, by implication, asking the author to dance
I admit to cynically feeling that the ladies being concerned that none of the "gints" were slighted was showing more care for their feelings than many gentlemen showed for those of ladies when in conventional roles -- the ladies were perhaps deliberately setting an example for the gentlemen of how they wished to be treated....[a few comments and a bad poem behind the cut]
The fourth in a very occasional series of short descriptions of specialty dance events from the pages of the 1890-1891 volume of Demorest's Family Magazine. Like the tidbit about the thé dansante, this short description of a party-opening cotillion (in the dance party game sense) is drawn from the "Chat" column of the February, 1891, issue. The theme, of course, is Valentine's Day!
The original text from Demorest's:
A Valentine Party, for which invitations are already out, promises to be a unique affair. There are but twenty persons invited, ten ladies and ten gentlemen, all well acquainted, and each has been requested to bring an original valentine, which must be included in the envelope furnished by the hostess and already superscribed "To my Valentine." On arriving, the guests will find in each dressing-room a bunch of ribbons of different colors, also a heart-shaped bag. A ribbon is to be tied around each valentine, which is then to be deposited in the bag, through a slit at the top. After all are assembled, two children, dressed as Cupids, will act as postmen, delivering the valentines from the gentlemen's bag to the ladies, and from the ladies' bag to the gentlemen. The valentines are then to be read aloud by the person receiving them (being considered as written expressly for them), and a vote taken to decide on the two best (one by a lady and one by a gentleman) from a literary point of view, the two wittiest, and the two most sentimental, and prizes given to the writer of each. The prizes are to be silver-mounted cushions, photograph frames, and mirrors for the ladies, and scarf-pins, pocket-cushions, and silver-mounted penwipers for the gentlemen, all heart-shaped. The refreshments are to be served at small heart-shaped tables, and afterward there will be dancing, those having matching ribbons to be partners for the first dance.
-- Demorest's Family Magazine, Volume XXVII, No. 4, February, 1891, p. 245...[a few thoughts behind the cut]
I didn't look for a description of a Scottish leap year ball, but I came across one anyway while rummaging through newspaper archives. This was an actual Leap Day ball, held on "that carnival of female freedom", February 29, 1892, in Dundee. It was described the next day in the Evening Telegraph.
The ball was hosted by the ladies of the Physical Recreation Society, presumably a branch of the National Physical Recreation Society founded by Herbert Gladstone in 1885 or 1886. According to the website of The John Hulley Memorial Fund, the NPRS was the successor of the National Olympian Association (1865-1883) and a founder organization of the British Olympic Association (1905). While not an Olympic sport, dancing was certainly physical recreation, as the author of the article noted:
It goes without saying that it was full of “go,” for gymnastics—or, shall we say, physical culture?—means health, and health means high spirits, and high spirits spell enjoyment and fresh pleasure.
Large sections of the article were devoted to describing the dresses and the decor. But there is also substantial information about the dance program, which is interesting not just as a leap year ball but as an example of an 1890s Scottish ball in general, and about the ladies in charge. In true leap year tradition,
Seven ladies of the Society formed the Committee, and managed everything, including their men friends who ventured to criticise the arrangements.
Along with organizing the ball, they wore badges and acted as the reception committee and floor managers at the ball itself:
They were all distinguished last night by a tiny bow of red and black striped ribbon, carrying a five-pointed star, on which were inscribed the initials of the Society. Their functions were to act as a Reception Committee, to introduce strangers, give the signal for the music to strike up, and so on,
...though occasionally they became distracted by the pleasures of the dance:
all of which pleasant duties were duly performed—excepting when a gadding member floated off in a fascinating waltz, oblivious of the obligations imposed by her badge, and other quite excusable lapses of that nature. “Oh, I’m dancing the first waltz! I forgot all about this!” said one fair lady, as she looked ruefully at her star....[a Scottish dance program, complete with reel, behind the cut]
Off to the land of the Mormons for a leap year ball in the exciting community of Roweville, a town in northern Utah so small it barely exists even now, when it has been renamed Bothwell. In 1896, it was a small farming community founded only two years before.
The ball was held on Friday, January 17, 1896, but coverage of the ball appeared in the Brigham City Bugler two weeks later, apparently submitted by a local correspondent who signed herself
The Duchess.
Roweville, Utah, Jan. 24, 1896.
I'd like to know the story behind that title!
The "Grand Ball" was proclaimed the first leap year party ever held in Roweville, which of course had not even existed four years before. It was held in the schoolhouse with "a part of the Bear River Orchestra" to provide the music for dancing under the guidance of an experienced floor manager, Mr. August Nichols, Jr., and was said to be well-attended. The dance program was not given in the article, but the company danced until one in the morning, ate supper until two, then continued dancing until five. I admire their endurance...[the Man-Made Supper behind the cut]
It's leap year, it's leap month, and it's time to look at more descriptions of leap year balls!
First up, a ball held in Enid, Oklahoma, on Friday, January 17, 1896. Note that leap year balls, while concentrated in the beginning of the year because it was the middle of the social season and leap year was a new and exciting element to play with, were not necessarily held on Leap Day, or even in February.
Enid had only been founded a few years earlier, in 1893, during a "Land Run" in which former Cherokee land was opened to settler claims. It grew rapidly, supposedly reaching over four thousand people within a year. These details and more about its history may be found here.
This was a classic leap year ball:
When once in four years the flight of time gives one more day to the month that withesseth the birth of G. Washington, Esq., it brings with it a custom long established of awarding to the ladies the rights and prerogatives that at all other times belong exclusively to the gentlemen....[pretty standard details behind the cut]
The end of winter is in (distant) sight. and I am slowly ramping up travel again as we hopefully pass out of peak-respiratory-illness season. But I still expect to spend most of February quietly at home muttering over translations from several languages...[minimal schedule behind the cut]
Believe it or not, even I get a little bit tired of going through the seemingly endless list of insignificant couple dance variations published in M. B. Gilbert's Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) and reprinted in French in G. W. Lopp's La Danse (Paris, 1903). Studying all of them is important for my overall project of analyzing late nineteenth century American couple dance variations, but a lot of them are just trivial as individual dances, though still useful as data points and material for improvisation.
As with my trio of tiny galop variations a few years ago, here are four dances that fall in the mazurka/redowa classification that just don't have enough to them to warrant individual posts.
What these four have in common:
- They all use the polka redowa (polka in 3/4 time): (hop) slide-cut-leap, counted &123. While three of the four are called mazurkas, they have very little obvious mazurka in them and a great deal of polka redowa. All four will work to redowa and mazurka music in general. Gilbert and Lopp both specify a tempo of 144 beats per minute for that entire genre of music.
- They almost certainly all have matching sheet music, their names being the names of the tune they were originally attached to. But the music hasn't emerged in my searches so far, the dances are regular enough in pattern that specific music isn't critical, and they just aren't interesting enough for me to devote a lot of time to continued searching. If the music turns up, it turns up. If not, these make easy variations for improvisation.
- They all appear in both Gilbert and Lopp, and the descriptions match with only insignificant exceptions.
- They present no reconstruction issues.
So, in the interest of efficiency, here are the four dances, with brief notes about each....[four tiny dances behind the cut]
Much more intriguing to me than the walk-and-pivot polka mazurka des bals publiques discussed in my previous post is the variant described most clearly by Desrat in his Traité de la danse (Paris, c1880; later edition c1900), in which he suggested dancing the polka mazurka using the "valse à deux pas" (his personal name for the valse à deux temps) but in counter-tempo (par contretemps), meaning with the steps shifted to different notes of the bar:
Quand les danseurs valsent la Polka-Mazurka au moyen de la valse à deux pas, ils la dansent par contretemps exécutee en prenant le premier temps de chaque pas de Danse sur le troisième temps de chaque mesure.
My loose translation:
When dancers perform the polka mazurka by means of the valse à deux pas [temps], they dance it counter-tempo, executed by taking the first movement of each step of the dance on the third beat of each measure.
I gave this a try and found it a truly delightful way to dance to mazurka music, throwing the accent of the dance onto the third beat in a way that matches the music very well...[more wacky things to do to polka mazurka music behind the cut]
This past weekend I got into an interesting online discussion about the definition of polka mazurka, during which one person sniffed that it was merely waltz invading mazurka. That's not actually true in the original technical sense of the dance, but late nineteenth-century French dancing masters did note some things people did as "polka mazurka" that bore no resemblance at all to the original steps. One of those things was the version supposedly done at public balls in Paris (by the lower classes), as opposed to in private salons (by the upper class). It was not
"codified", complained the dancing masters. It was "untidy". But at least it did not lack grace if the movements were "rapid and regular"...[dance steps, sources, and commentary behind the cut]
No, not that Spanish Waltz! This Spanish Waltz is a sixteen-bar sequence dance. According to a short article published September 19, 1918, in The Lima Times-Democrat (Lima, Ohio), it was introduced at the recent meetings of the Ohio and International Associations of Dancing Teachers in Columbus, Ohio. Instructions for the dance seem to have been published in full by the Springfield School of Dancing in The Daily Morning Sun of Springfield, Ohio. I don't have a copy of that publication, but the directions and illustrations were reprinted in The Two Step, Volume XXIX, No. 3, dated March, 1919, with a reference to The Daily Morning Sun publication.
The Spanish Waltz was credited to W. D. Lynch of Akron, Ohio, head of both the Ohio and international associations, who self-interestedly assured readers of The Times-Democrat article that it was one of three new dances that would be popular during the upcoming season, along with the old standbys the one-step, waltz, and foxtrot. The Two-Step, which apparently copied the Springfield article verbatim, included a note that the dance would be taught at a lesson series by a Mr. and Mrs. Goodfellow at the Springfield School of Dancing beginning January 8th, 1919, which would not have been the most useful information by the March issue!
The Two-Step/Daily Morning Sun introduction to the dance was:
A Simplified Ballroom Dance Novelty adapted after the Attractive and Beautiful Spanish Dancing which has been and is yet the rage in the larger eastern cities.
The article in The Times-Democrat described it as follows:
"The Spanish waltz is a simplified version of the Spanish dances seen on the stage with partners facing each other. Any Spanish music, played a trifle fast, may be used. The dance is somewhat complicated."
Standards vary, and I can't speak to what the stage versions were like, but along with being simplified, I would call the Spanish Waltz simple rather than complicated. Judge for yourself...[sequence behind the cut]
An entertaining article somewhat misleadingly titled "Sage Maidens of Cornell University" appeared in Demorest's Family Magazine in January, 1891. Cornell was one of the first universities to become coeducational (in 1870) and the campus life of female students was of general interest. Cornell's class of 1890, with about a dozen female students, is pictured at left; click to enlarge.
The article, written from a fairly feminist (for the nineteenth century) perspective, makes it clear that while "Sage maidens" is a pretty turn of phrase, not all of the female students at Cornell lived in Sage Hall (completed in 1875), and that in any case, neither building nor female students were isolated from the campus as a whole. The building contained classroom space as well, and male and female coeds (the article makes a point of using the term for men as well!) studied together and socialized together rather extensively. Including, of course, dancing...[hops, hops, and proms behind the cut]
Happy new year!
Since I didn't really get a holiday break in December, and I'm traveling overseas again the first week in January for a conference, the rest of January will be my Official Post-Holiday Break -- the first time in several months I won't be preparing a gig, preparing a paper, preparing to travel, or recovering from some/all of the above...[link to the conference for which registration is already closed behind the cut]
It feels like November is going to stretch for two more days as I wind up an intense trip to the UK that has so far involved two days of teaching and visits to three different libraries and archives in three different cities/towns. Today and tomorrow will be library #4 in yet another town. On Saturday I fly home and have one entire day there before turning around and heading to Boston for my last public event of the year: DJing once more for Bluesy Tuesy! I'll be sneaking in some research there, too. Weather permitting, this may include a cemetery stroll...[link to Bluesy behind the cut]
I don't usually write about foxtrot in November, but I don't usually teach foxtrot in Ukraine in the middle of a war, either, and last month, the dancers of Kyiv's Vintage Dance Community wanted something for foxtrot that I hadn't previously described here on Kickery. Here is the description for their future reference and that of others interested in the variations for the foxtrot of the 1910s.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
At least two versions of a zig-zag sequence appeared in short booklets published in 1914 and 1915:
- The Zig-Zag Step and "Trot": Joan Sawyer's How to Dance the Fox Trot (Columbia Graphaphone Company, New York,1914)
- The Zig-Zag Run: Description of Modern Dances as Standardized by the New York Society Teachers of Dancing and approved by the Congress of Dancing Societies of America at meeting held December 27th, 1914, in New York City, N. Y. (American National Association Masters of Dancing, Pittsburgh, 1915)
Sawyer characterized the figure as a "hard one" but also "loads of fun". Her description...[is behind the cut]
This month will be very, very quiet for sixteen days. Then it will be very, very busy for ten days as I ricochet from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to London, England, leading balls and teaching. Whee!
After my London weekend I will be wandering around the UK for a few days doing research. Dorset, here I come...[details of balls and stuff behind the cut]
On August 7th, 1861, the Long Branch correspondent of The New York Herald reported great excitement in the New Jersey ocean resort town at the news that Mrs. Lincoln, wife of President Abraham Lincoln, would soon be arriving in town. Mary Todd Lincoln, then 43 years old, is pictured at left in an 1861 photo (click to enlarge) by the famous photographer Matthew Brady.
In the column "The Watering Place", published in the paper on August 9th, the anonymous correspondent, based in the National Hotel, wrote that the announcement of her arrival had "completely eclipsed, for the time, the rival sensations of our masquerade ball and Siddons' readings." Like other "watering places", Long Branch had suffered during the year from "the pressures of the times", meaning the outbreak of the Civil War, and it was hoped that Mrs. Lincoln's visit would restore the "old animation and gayety" of the resort.
In the meantime, there were "hotel wars" in Long Branch over where she would stay. D. P. Peters, proprietor of the National Hotel, expected her to stay there, since he had originally invited the Lincolns to Long Branch earlier in the year. His invitation letter of May 27, 1861, has survived; a transcription published in the book Dear Mr. Lincoln may be seen here. Due to the war, President Lincoln was not free to leave Washington, but Mrs. Lincoln would come. Might she even arrive the following day for a special event?
"To-morrow night, for example, we are to have a masquerade and fancy dress ball at this hotel, and Phillips, the costumer, is here to assist in transforming common folks into princes, queens, monks, and fools--very little transformation is needed in that character, often. If the dancers would only wear their bathing dresses, it strikes me that they would be most effectually disguised. Such a motley set as one sees on the beach of a fine morning no fancy dress ball could equal...[bogus Mrs. Lincoln and Japanese teen idol behind the cut]
On January 25, 1862, a dramatic little story appeared in a column in The Philadelphia Inquirer, "The New York Letter", which covered news from New York City. The United States was eight months into the Civil War against the Confederacy (formally, the Confederate States of America, or C. S. A.), and New Yorkers were on the alert for Confederate spies, or "Secesh" (secessionists). So it was quite alarming for a gentleman to notice, in a paint shop,
several suspicious looking bundles, boxes, etc., marked "C. S. A. Sutler's Department," "C. S. A. Medical Department," etc.
He reported the items to the police, and detectives were duly assigned to watch the shop, where, on the evening of January 23rd (going by the date of the column), they noticed someone leaving the premises,
enwrapped in a long cloak and scarf, carrying the suspicious bundles under his arm
Suspicious indeed! The detectives followed him to a house, which he and dozens of other cloaked men entered. Was it a secret meeting of spies? Smugglers? Terrorists? Police surrounded the house, but after sending one policeman inside to reconnoiter, they abruptly retired from the scene.
Why did they leave? And what does this have to do with dance, anyway?...[reveal behind the cut]
Ah, sweet October, which I generally devote to discussion of fancy dress and masquerade balls, weird cotillion figures, and similar frivolity!
I have two words to start off the month in the proper spirit:
headless quadrille
Specifically:
The first couple is Anne Boleyn and Louis XVI. They are facing Lady Jane Grey and Marino Faliero (a 14th century Venetian Doge). Marie Antoinette and Charles I make up the first side couple, facing the Earl of Essex, dancing alone.
In case anyone missed the connection, all of these people were beheaded.
Themed quadrilles from history or literature were very common at fancy dress balls in the nineteenth century, but this really has got to be the Best Theme Ever. I just about died laughing when I realized the joke...[more dance weirdness behind the cut]
Life and dancing return! October is going to be filled primarily with a two-week trip to Europe for a conference and a very special dance workshop, then home to Connecticut to prepare for a crazy late November...[details behind the cut]
While rummaging around in early eighteenth century material, I came across the marvelous City and country recreation: or, wit and merriment rightly calculated, for the pleasure and advantage of either sex, part of the frontispiece illustration of which appears at left. This short book, published in London in 1705, is a hilarious combination of advice book for lovers, warnings for the innocent newcomer to the city, poetry collection, and handy divination manual covering everything from astrology to palmistry with a few stops in between. Dance comes into it only indirectly, alas, but it's great reading regardless.
No author is listed, but the preface is signed with the initials "J. S." A scholar of the literature of this period, which I am not, might be able to connect those initials to a known writer.
I'll include the full descriptions of each of the two parts of the book just for their impressive long-windedness:
Part I. Containing the Pleasures of Courtship and Address; or, The whole Art of making Love. Directions for making a suitable Choice. A Description of true Love in all its Changes. How to express Love's silent Language. To know if a Party be in Love. Instructions for Courting a Maid or Widow: and how the Female Sex may make Love known, without any Injury to a modest and vertuous Behaviour; and how to dive into the secret Thoughts of their Lovers. The Comforts of Marriage in all its Circumstances; and how a good Wife may Reclaim a bad Husband, and the like of a Husband by a Wife. The whole Art of Fortune-Telling, shewing what Good or Bad Fortune is assigned you in Affairs of Love, Business, &c. A Collection of Choice Poems, by the most Celebrated Wits of the Age.
Part II. Containing all the cunning Intreagues of the Beaus, Sharpers, Bullies, and Female-Decoys, to Deceive and Ruin Gentlemen, Tradesmen, &c. With their lively Characters, and a plain Discription of their several Practices, to prevent their future Designs.
The Town Miss; or, London Jilt, in all her Humours, Shifts, and Intreagues; set forth, as a Looking-Glass, for the unthinking Beaus; Keeping Squires, Foolish Tradesmen, and others, to see their Folly in.
To which is added, the Misery of Gaming: Or, The Art of keeping Ready Money in One's Pocket at all Times: With other useful Matters, never before made Publick.
As usual, I've pulled out only the dance-related references, but I heartily recommend reading the entire thing. It was intended to be humorous in its time, but the overwrought eighteenth century prose makes it even more so to the modern reader. There are also genuine insights to be had about period attitudes and practices.
The entire book is available online here...[comedy behind the cut]
To sleep, perchance to actually get rested? Once again, I have a non-gig calendar for the month, though I will be making a couple of personal trips, including an Actual Vacation for the first time since 2018. See you in October, when things get lively again...[absolutely nothing of importance behind the cut!]
We are now on May, Take III, and I have nothing original to say about it except that I am really looking forward to autumn. I'll make a short trip to Boston for DJing and library research, then back at home again for research and writing and all the mundane life stuff....[exactly one thing behind the cut]
And now for something completely different...
Once upon a time, there was a song, and a dance, and a video...and I totally missed them. It was the autumn of 1981. MTV was brand-new. And a band called Adam and the Ants released "Prince Charming", with its very own associated dance, supposedly written because the music did not lend itself to standard nightclub/disco dancing (Wikipedia). The single record, shown at left (click to enlarge) claimed to be
Introducing the new Dance Craze "The Prince Charming"...[which I will duly discuss behind the cut. With variations!]
Dorothea is a full choreographed march taken from H. Layton Walker's Twentieth Century Cotillion Figures, by (Two Step Publishing Company, Buffalo, New York, 1912), though it probably originated elsewhere. I don't know the significance of the name. But how could...
June feels a bit like May, Take II: a quick trip to Boston early in the month to DJ and do a bit of library research, then holing up at home for research and writing...and yardwork and home renovations and all those little things I do when I'm not working....[one lonely little gig behind the cut]
Tra la...it's May! Waltz workshops and DJing a waltz afternoon in Boston early in the month, then I'll be taking a break from travel for some needed time at home for research and writing...[waltz details behind the cut]
As April begins I'll still be on my March Chicago trip, now extended to Wisconsin. Then after a couple of weeks at home, I'll be on the road again to the amazing New England Folk Festival (NEFFA) and a Civil War ball in Pennsylvania, with a bit of DJing tucked in between. I'm looking forward to a fabulous and eclectic month...[details behind the cut]
March for me will come in like the proverbial lion as I wrap up my little European tour with a weekend of workshops in Munich and go out, err, still like the lion with a trip to Chicago for research and an evening of country dancing (loosely defined). In between, I'll be in Boston for DJing (and more research). Updated: the DJing and Boston trip are canceled, conveniently replaced by a class at a local university! Whee!...[details behind the cut]
As I go flying over the ocean waves for my miniature European tour, here's an appropriately-named one-step variation from the pages of Frank H. Norman's Complete Dance Instructor (Ottawa, 1914). As far as I know, that is the only place "Ocean Waves" was ever published, so I would not consider it a common variation. But it's kind of wacky fun and provides something besides boat swings to do with both arms outstretched, in case anyone was feeling the lack of such things...[simple variation behind the cut]
I'm going to jointly cover the two contra dances prolific nineteenth century musician-caller-author-publisher Elias Howe published under the titles Jenny Lind Polka and German Polka because they share the same unusual eight-bar sequence of figures as well as an additional sixteen of the thirty-two bars total of each dance. They're more variations on a theme than separate dances.
Their names refer to pieces of music. "Jenny Lind Polka" was, of course, named for the famous "Swedish nightingale", shown at left, who toured the United States in 1850-1852. It is still regularly played and recorded. "German Polka" is more obscure.
Both dances were published with consistent wording for each in Howe's Complete ball-room handbook (1858), American dancing master, and ball-room prompter (1862 and 1866), and New American Dancing Master (1882 and 1892). I think it extremely likely that the figures were arranged by Howe himself. One or both dances also appeared in two works that were highly derivative of Howe: both of them in John M. Schell's Prompting, How To Do It. (New York/Boston/Chicago, 1890), and the Jenny Lind Polka alone, with a difference that was probably an error, in the anonymous Gems of the Ball Room Call Book. (Chicago, 1896)....[comparison 'n' reconstructions 'n' stuff behind the cut]
The "Lyra Figures", a fancy march cotillion (dance party game) in which the columns of dancers outline the shape of a lyre within a wreath, were published in Twentieth Century Cotillion Figures, by H. Layton Walker (Two Step Publishing Company, Buffalo, New York, 1912). I suspect that, like the Winthrop(e), they were copied from some other source, but I do not currently have any idea what it might have been.
This figure would be somewhat difficult for a ball preceptor to lead "cold", at least without multiple floor managers, but with a lead couple who knew the track, it wouldn't be all that difficult. After a simple march-around lead-in, the leading lady and gentleman stay on their own sides of the room, leading their lines up and down curving tracks to form the shape of the lyre. It might even work with only a single knowledgeable dancer, if their partner were good at moving in mirror image and the room not too crowded for them to see each other at opposite sides. At the end, there is a simple march by platoons to end in facing lines for a waltz or other couple dance...[breakdown with diagrams behind the cut]
Dance history research, at least if done well, is often not so much a matter of coming up with definitive solutions as a continual cycling back through old material in the light of new sources or new understanding and correcting and refining one's work. I'm still in the middle of that process for the Klondike Two-Step, but as my region is currently undergoing an Arctic blast of cold air with a temperature similar to the average in the Klondike in January, it seems like a suitable moment to revisit the dance and check in on new developments. When I first discussed it here thirteen-plus years ago, I was mainly concerned with the basic reconstruction of the dance, and since the single description I had for it was a bit of a mess, I had plenty to say about that and neither the desire nor the resources to delve more deeply.
It would probably be helpful to go read my earlier post before going on.
So, what have I learned since I wrote it?...[dance research in progress behind the cut]
February starts gently for me with an online lecture that is a sort of sequel to one I did in Moscow eight (!!) years ago and one of my regular trips to Boston to DJ before I head off to Europe at the end of the month for a teaching trip to Belgium and Germany that will also take me briefly through Dublin and Amsterdam for research, art, and reunions...[details behind the cut]
In honor of Burns night, here's a simple (and completely American) Scottish-themed "society" dance by Chicago dancing master Robert Alexander Campbell: The Bonnie Brae. Campbell, also the creator of The Vassar, was credited as both the choreographer of the dance and the composer of the music, though the latter was "harmonized" by Robert Heiss and on the sheet music the dance was co-credited to a Miss Josephine E. Rice.
Interestingly, this time Campbell labeled himself a member of the Western Association Normal School Masters of Dancing rather than the leader of Campbell's Solo Orchestra and apparently no longer felt the need to note that he was the pupil of C. A. Carr. Also of note: the cover gave not only a Chicago publisher but a London one as well. Apparently Campbell was moving up in the world! Though one notes that he did not state on the music that the dance had actually been accepted by the Western Association Normal School, which I discussed briefly here.
"Bonnie Brae" is Gaelic for "pleasant hill", according to this useful article about a street with that name in Los Angeles. Given his surname, perhaps Campbell came by the Gaelic honestly, or perhaps he just thought the phrase sounded suitably Scottish, a nice match for the tartan-clad dancers on the cover, which may be seen at left (click to enlarge). The lady at center might be Miss Rice...[details, with racket, behind the cut]
Wrapping up my little series on extended-Regency-era oddities, let's talk about an unusual version of the English finishing dance, Sir Roger de Coverley! This is one of the rare dances where tune and dance are so tightly associated that it's reasonable to give the dance the tune name.
I discussed a typical Regency-era version of the classic Sir Roger de Coverley figure long, long ago. Since then, I've accumulated a number of other versions of the figure with the same characteristic elements: opening figures performed on the long diagonals followed by whole-set figures that end with the original top couple progressed to the bottom. I've written up a couple of later nineteenth century versions here and here.
Now, this is not to say that there were never any other, more typical, country dance figures set to the "Roger de Coverley" tune. In its earliest appearance with dance figures in the ninth edition of Playford's The Dancing Master, published in 1695, it is printed with a normal progressive figure, completely unrelated to the later dance. One hundred and thirty years after that, a different figure, very generic-Regency, was published with it in Analysis of the London Ball-Room (printed for Thomas Tegg, London, 1825). Never underestimate the willingness of music publishers and dancers, to recycle a tune.
But there's one set of figures I've found printed with "Sir Roger de Coverley" which is a real oddity...[and I talk about it at length behind the cut]
When I add new extended-Regency-era country dance tune books to my collection of photos and scans, one of the things I do is quickly skim through the figures looking for anything out of the ordinary. And while heys (or reels) are quite common figures for country dances in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (indeed, all the way back to the seventeenth century!), in this period, they are almost always heys for three. Figures like "hey your own sides", "hey contrary sides and hey your own sides", "hey top and bottom" (where one dancer in a couple goes up and one goes down the set), and the corner-formation heys where the lady heys with two gentlemen and the gentleman with two ladies are all very common. But these are all heys for three dancers. A "right and left" quite round is technically a circular hey for four, but a classic, Scotch reel-style hey for four dancers in a line is not listed as a standard figure and doesn't really turn up.
Until, of course, it does....[two dance figures behind the cut]
Winding down for the year after a busy late autumn with a final trip up to Boston. Then home for a few weeks to attempt to catch up on writing projects...[couple of small gigs behind the cut]
Things are getting lively again! Online and in-person workshops, two balls, and a DJ gig, plus at least two library visits, and I'm hoping for four...[gig info behind the cut]
On Tuesday, April 23, 1867, a children's fancy dress ball, or bal travesti, was held at the home of General Émile Félix Fleury, a prominent senator and equerry of the Emperor Napoleon III. The event was covered in the pages of Le Monde Illustré on May 4, 1867, with the illustration below (click to enlarge) and a brief description of the event.
Bal d’enfants travesti, donné le 23 avril, chez le général Fleury,grand écuyer de S. M. L’Empereur — Le galop final.
Children's fancy dress ball, given the 23rd of April at the home of Général Fleury,
Grand Equerry of His Majesty the Emperor — The final galop.
A full transcription of the original article with my translation is given at the end of this post....[lots of random details behind the cut]
And...it's back to masquerades, fancy dress balls, crazy cotillion figures, and other fun for the month of October! First up: a Christmas masquerade ball in Montana in 1899.
The Degree of Honor masquerade ball was held on Christmas night at the Hefferlin Opera House in Livingston, Montana, the elaborate building at right in the postcard photo at left; click to enlarge. At this time, the Degree of Honor was the ladies' auxiliary of the Ancient Order of United Workmen, a post-Civil War "fraternal" mutual benefit society providing insurance, burial policies, etc, to working-class men. In the late 1890s, the Degree of Honor was said to have had 40,000 members nationally. It later spun off into a separate organization and existed independently until 2017.
Livingston itself was tiny at the time, having been founded as a cluster of tents at a future railroad stop in 1882. Even today, its population is under ten thousand people (per the 2020 census); at the time of the ball, it was probably only around a thousand. This puts into perspective its description as "largely attended" in the coverage of the ball in the social column of The Anaconda Standard on Sunday, December 31, 1889: seventy-five couples following the leaders of the march. For a town of that size, that is actually quite impressive, and the coverage noted that the event succeeded both socially and financially...[details, a Brownie costume, and racist practices behind the cut]
Writing time! I have a huge backlog of papers and articles to get written, so I'll be spending most of October home doing that, with one trip at the end of the month to the UK for an academic conference...[details, not many, behind the cut]
Finally, a month that begins to look like normal for me, with workshops and DJing and lots of research time. On the road again...[gigs'n'stuff behind the cut]
Onward goes the hot and quiet summer! I am still consolidating and collating and cataloguing my research collection, with interesting results, especially in the "collating" area, with my only event this month a reunion with my pandemic group of online cotillion students...[one private online event behind the cut]
Well, now I have two months of a fairly long, hot summer ahead of me without much going on before things kick back into gear again in the autumn. I've been making a project for the last month or so of organizing and cataloguing my rather enormous collection (and, um, backlog) of research photos from various libraries, so I expect I'll continue with that, and I have plenty of writing to do! But first, one more online lecture...[and, indeed, behind the cut is one lecture]
Another month full of exciting travel, this time to Germany, and then on to precepting a Civil War ball in Pennsylvania. In-person teaching and dancing, hurrah...[in-person events behind the cut!]
IN-PERSON EVENTS. That pretty much sums it up. See you on the real, live dance floor...[two real, live events behind the cut]
Spring has sprung, I'm still in the USA, and I have one more month of online events before transitioning back to primarily in-person teaching in May and June...[a few online events behind the cut]
Well.
The major possibility I was expecting for March was to move back to Moscow and resume teaching dance in Russia and Ukraine, so I didn't plan much of anything else. As anyone who has not been living under a rock for the last few days is no doubt aware, that is probably not happening this month, and it's hard to say whether it will happen in the foreseeable future. Or at all....[not much behind the cut because I thought I was going to be occupied moving]
Another dance associated with the Mahler family of dancing masters in St. Louis is the American Boy, an easy two-step sequence described by Jacob Mahler in the October 24th, 1909, issue of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It is one of two sequences fully described in an article entitled "Five New Dances Now the Delight of Society" on page 65. It's not clear whether Mahler choreographed it himself, and I've not been able to find any other source for the dance.
The starting position is the dancers side by side, gentleman on the left and lady on the right, holding inside hands as shown in the illustration at left from the Post-Dispatch article, and facing line of dance. The gentleman starts on the left foot and the lady on the right.
Interestingly, Mahler gave the lady's steps, with the gentleman dancing opposite, so I will do the same....[sequence and thoughts on various reconstruction elements behind the cut]
"For children there have been accepted La Veta and the Russian Militaire, the latter a semi-drill and march step, combining simple and graceful poses for the little ones."
-- Marie Petravsky, "New Fads in Dances", The Sunday Morning Call (Lincoln, Nebraska). Sunday, October 25, 1896, p. 5.
The accepting organization referred to was The Western Association and Normal School of Masters of Dancing, which also accepted a number of dances for adults that year. The newspaper article was timed to the start of the new dancing season in New York, but on the sheet music it is noted that the dance was adopted on June 11, 1896, in Toledo, Ohio. It is also claimed, apparently inaccurately, that "This Dance was the only Dance adopted out of ten others presented."
The choreographer of the dance was John A. Mahler, brother of the much better-known St. Louis dancing master Jacob Mahler. Both brothers taught children; another of John Mahler's dances, the Two and a Half Step, was inscribed to "the Young Ladies of the Mary Institute and Hosmer Hall", two St. Louis schools. There is no indication on the sheet music that it was meant for children, which makes one wonder how many of the other simple sequence dances of the period might also have been meant for the younger set...[easy dance behind the cut]
As we come out of the Omicron surge, I'm starting to plan actual, in-person events for later this spring (May/June), hoping they will actually take place this year. Meanwhile, I'm back with the California-based Historical Tea & Dance Society again this month for another Zoom lecture and will have a research trip or two as well...[three things behind the cut, three things behind the cut, three little things, all behind the cut!]
(See the first and second posts in this series for the structure of the quadrille, the "chorus" figure, and the introductions to each figure.)
Completing the National Park Quadrille, here are the third and fourth figures!
Figure 3 (4b intro, A=8b, B=8b; played 4b + AABBx4)4b Introduction (not repeated): gentlemen step to the center and turns to face partners, all quickly bow/courtesy, and the gentlemen return to places
4b Head trios forward and back
4b Head trios turn opposites by two hands
4b All twelve join hands, forward and back
4b All twelve take hands three in trios and circle round to places
16b "Chorus" figure (described in detail here)
Repeat three more times (heads, sides, sides)...[notes and the problematic ending of the fourth figure behind the cut]
(See the previous post in this series for the structure of the quadrille and the "chorus" figure.)
Going on with the actual figures of the National Park Quadrille!
Note that the first figure does not open with eight bars for the standard honors to partners and corners or opposites. There is a specific kind of honors for the four-bar introduction to each figure.
Figure 1 (4b intro, A=8b, B=16b; played 4b + AABx4)4b Introduction (not repeated): gentlemen step to the center and turns to face partners, all quickly bow/courtesy, and the gentlemen return to places
4b Head gentlemen with right-hand ladies turn by the right hand (polka steps)
4b Head gentlemen with left-hand ladies turn by the left hand (polka steps)
4b Head gentlemen with right-hand ladies promenade halfway round
4b Head gentlemen with right-hand ladies right and left (chaîne anglaise) to places
16b "Chorus" figure (described in detail here)
At the end of the figure the two ladies in each trio will have exchanged places. Head couples repeat, then side couples twice more...[performance thoughts behind the cut]
The sheet music for Clifford G. Sweet's National Park Quadrille, published in 1892, immediately intrigued me because the cover (shown at left, click to enlarge) proclaimed it "For 8 Ladies & 4 Gentlemen". In other words, it was a trio quadrille, for four trios in a square, which is one of my favorite variant quadrille formations. The sheet music was not accompanied by dance figures, but, happily, they are available elsewhere, though not in their original publication. Two near-identical versions of the instructions may be found in The American Prompter and Guide to Etiquette by E. H. Kopp (Cincinnati-New York-Chicago, 1896) and a late edition of Clendenen's [Fashionable] Quadrille Book and Guide to Etiquette (Chicago, 1899). Given how close the language is in the two sources, I suspect that both authors were copying from the missing original.
The National Park Quadrille is a four-figure set performed with either polka steps or plain steps ("according to the ability of the dancers") for most of the figures, with a generous amount of polka for couples thrown in during the "chorus" that ends each figure, during which the glide polka, discussed here, should be used. This is essentially a combination of two slides of galop (one measure) plus a polka step (one measure). If dancing the polka in the casual slide-together-slide style, which I suspect was typical at this time, it will feel much like a four-slide galop (as described here).
The most interesting element of this quadrille is the back-and-forth progression for the ladies: on each iteration of the quadrille, they change places within their trio, from left side of the gentleman to right and vice-versa. Since the ladies on the left and right of each trio perform different figures, this prevents any imbalance in the dancing. Each of the four figures should be performed four times, twice for the head couples and twice for the side couples. It is noted that if this feels too long, the first three figures can be done only twice (once for heads and once for sides), but that produces a slightly strange result, with the ladies in different positions in each figure and one lady getting more polka-round opportunities than the other...[going on with the reconstruction behind the cut]
Happy new year! It's got to be better than the last one, right? Did I say that last year, too? (Nope.)
This month I'm back (online) with the California-based Historical Tea & Dance Society for another lecture and will have a research trip or two, but we're in the midst of the Omicron surge, so not much else is happening, alas...[and thus not much is behind the cut, but there's that lecture!]
And...we may be heading into another winter viral surge. Fortunately, I've only got online events this month, but I'll be making research trips to Boston and Washington, D.C., and continuing to push my writing (now with extra added translation!) forward. Life may be quite, but it's not boring...[two small things only behind the cut]
Back in the ballroom at last! This month I will return to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, for a Remembrance Day Ball (though in a different location and with a different organizer than in previous years) as well as doing a presentation for an online conference in the UK. I'll squeeze in a research jaunt around the Gettysburg trip and expect to spend time early in the month sewing a new costume for it since my ballgown is (sigh) still in Moscow. I'm so excited to get back on the dance floor in costume for the first time since early March, 2020...[details behind the cut]
All right, this month is actually lessof the same, relative to last month. Let's hope that roots grow deep in the dark, because this is definitely a dark and quiet month for me. But better things - including an in-person thing - are coming in November...[one lonely thing behind the cut]
I'm cautiously optimistic that things will start to pick up this autumn, though I'm not sure about winter. This will be a fairly quiet month (like so many recently...) with an online lecture and a research trip.
And if your dance group us back to actual in-person dancing, I'm willing to travel for small, vaccinated-only events and classes and, of course, to do Zoom lessons and talks for those who are not yet back to in-person events.
Please note: the events listed below are hosted in different cities/countries in different time zones. Please adjust for your own time zone before planning online attendance...[a very few things behind the cut]
I'm now in that in-between space in which online lesson series are no longer viable but, with the delta variant surge, in-person lesson and classes have not really started up again, at least not to the extent of hiring traveling teachers. But I have a wonderful research trip planned this month -- two separate libraries, two days in each, plus seeing friends I haven't see since 2019 -- and expect to have plenty of work to keep me busy, what with wrapping up my July events, revamping my masquerades lecture for another outing in September, and pushing several research and writing projects forward...[not much in the way of publicly-accessible events behind the cut]
All right, this is getting a little ridiculous. Remember I said last month that that series of online classes was really the last one? Well...it wasn't.
So let's try this again:
Still no in-person classes, but this month I'll be doing one more series (the last one! really!) of cotillion working group classes, using a different potpourri scheme - multiple figures repeating multiple times. I'll also be lecturing for the Regency Fiction Writers Virtual Conference and teaching hand jive at the fabulous (and free!) online Stockton Folk Dance Camp. Stockton is a fabulous bargain - a week of classes with an international cast of teachers, tons of dancing and music, and free.
And if anyone is ready to sponsor in-person classes in the USA again...I'm fully vaccinated and ready to travel...[schedule details behind the cut]
I just can't seem to quit the online classes! Much to my surprise, I'm doing one more series - this is really the last one, I think - of experimenting on students with fresh cotillion research. I also hope to add a couple of Connecticut-local, vaccinated-only, in-person classes later this month...[small but fun schedule behind the cut]
Moving right along, pandemic-wise, I've now had both vaccinations (Pfizer/BioNTech) and am waiting out the two weeks until my immunity matures. For May, I'm teaching what will probably be my last full series of online classes and starting to plan out summer travel, which will with luck include both research and, just maybe, some in-person teaching...[one last online series, behind the cut]
I am now half-vaccinated and anticipate being fully so around the end of the month! Lessons and events continue to be online-only for me for now, with a return to limited in-person teaching possible as early as June. This month's highlight for me: after many years, a return to NEFFA (online version) to teach, of all things, 1950s hand jive! Details below!
Please note: the events listed below are hosted in different cities/countries in different time zones. Please adjust for your own time zone before planning online attendance...[details behind the cut]
The pandemic continues, but vaccines are rolling out apace in the USA, so I am feeling cautiously optimistic about later this year, though I've no idea when I'll be able to resume significant travel again. In the meantime, I'm still online-only...[a few classes behind the cut]
My excitement for February: returning to DJing blues! I'm not a big blues dancer, but I love the music and look forward to spinning online for my old Boston-area pals at Bluesy Tuesy and new folks from Powerhouse Blues! I'll also be returning to my ultra-basic footwork classes and might add another pop-up class or lecture somewhere in there...
Otherwise: it's still a pandemic. But the vaccines are coming!
Please note: the events listed below are hosted in different cities/countries in different time zones. Please adjust for your own time zone before planning online attendance...[short list of classes behind the cut]
Well, we're still online-only...this month is planned as a research/writing month, so while I'm doing one brand-new lecture, I'm not planning any other major teaching events, just a few low-key private pop-up classes, which will keep popping up here throughout the month. I expect more organized public classes to resume in February...[very few things behind the cut]
A nice little style detail for the foxtrot as danced in England in the years after World War I:
"A variation is also to be observed in the chassé done alternately to left and right, at an angle of 45 degrees to the line of the dance. In the ordinary way of doing this, say, when the man is going forward, he slides the left foot forward to the left, and then brings the right foot up to the left, and again advances the left. The new variation is to cross the right foot behind the left. When the chassé is done to the right, it is of course the left foot which is crossed behind the right. The lay (or the gentleman if he is going backwards), crosses her foot in front of the foot that is first moved."
--- "The Sitter Out" (column) in The Dancing Times (London), January 1920, p.270.
By the "chassé", the writer means the two-step, as is clear from the description of the "ordinary way" of performing it. The description is referenced again in March, 1920, issue (p. 439; the numbering is continuous across multiple issues). In the "To-Day in the Ballroom" box shown at left (click to enlarge), under "Fox-Trot", there is a note that "The crossing of the feet (described in January) is popular and effective if the steps are kept small...[cross-referenced source behind the cut!]
I recently saw the eighteenth-century African-British composer Ignatius Sancho (1729-1780) described as "largely forgotten", which struck me as an odd way to describe someone who's been the subject of a modern biography (Ignatius Sancho: African Man of Letters, by Reyahn King, Sukhdev Sandhu, James Walvin and Jane Girdham (1997)) and a one-man play in both London and New York City, recently had a new collection of his letters published (Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African, edited by Vincent Carretta (2015)), has had both facsimile and modern editions of his music published (including Ignatius Sancho (1729-1780), An Early African Composer in England: The Collected Editions of His Music in Facsimile, by Josephine B. Wright (1981) and at least five books of his works in modern notation from Africanus Editions), whose music is being recorded and performed, and, last but not least, whose dances have been the subject of at least a couple of books of reconstructions. We should all be so forgotten!
It occurred to me that I had one of those recordings, Minuets & Optional Dances (2015), by the Afro-American Chamber Music Society Orchestra, tucked away somewhere. I hadn't ever done much with it because it consists primarily of minuets, which are not something I spend much time on. But the 140th anniversary of his death seems like a good day to dig it out...[many minuet tracks behind the cut]
Well, here we are at the last month of this very strange 2020. As usual, I'm wrapping up my classes for the year. As not-usual, they are online classes. Hoping for better in 2021...[last few bits behind the cut]
November is going to feel strange this year, with no trip to Gettysburg for the Remembrance Day Balls. Hopefully they will be back next year! In the meantime, I'm going to spend November ping-ponging from the 17th century (unusual for me) to the early 20th, with a detour for footwork classes focusing mostly on late 18th to early 19th century dance. I'm especially excited about both the Playford Then and Now Festival, hosted by The Historical Dance Society (formerly the Dolmetsch Historical Dance Society) in the UK with a great lineup of speakers, and the chance to repeat for the Historical Tea and Dance Society in California a lecture I gave for a university group back in September on the intertwined lives of the dancers Vernon and Irene Castle and the musician James Reese Europe. Both the Castles and Europe are frequently discussed, lectured, and written about separately. I'm thrilled to bring their stories together!
Please note: the events listed below are hosted in different cities/countries in different time zones. Please adjust for your own time zone before planning online attendance...[details behind the cut]
I came across this story in a California newspaper, The Weekly Placer Herald, and didn't find it particularly believable. But it was not original to the Herald; the attribution at the end is to the Albany Dutchman, which seems to have been more of a weekly humor publication than a newspaper. Per the Library of Congress's Chronicling America website, it described itself in 1849 as "A weekly newspaper-devoted to fun, literature, good advice, women and other luxuries." I don't have any way to check the attribution at the moment, as the Albany Dutchman doesn't seem to be online, but that fits with my impression that this is a tall tale, not an actual incident. It nonetheless makes a light-hearted ending to my month of masquerades!
In the story, two friends, Bob and Frank, lie to Bob's wife about his having to help a sick uncle. In reality, they are sneaking off to a masquerade ball. While Bob is a married man, Frank is "a roue, and as a matter of course is a great favorite with the ladies—roues always are...[a twist and a moral behind the cut]
Here's a lively account of a jolly and slightly drunken masquerade held in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1843. This account has a little of everything: costumes, bad puns, a bit about the dances, and the effects of alcohol on the revelers. It's too long a report to comment on every bit of it, but the entire thing is transcribed at the bottom of this post.
The report starts out with a lot of philosophy about the joys of masquerades, but the first really useful bit is that as in A Few Friends, the unmasking is done at supper-time, which was probably around midnight:
The unmasking at the supper table is often a great source of laughter and surprise, when it discovers the faces of numerous acquaintances who have been playing off their wit and raillery against each other all the evening, under their various disguises.
All sorts of people attended masquerades, which is part of what made them scandalous. In Kentucky, at least, this mixing was not to be feared, though I suspect the upper classes might have differed on this point:
A masquerade is an unsorted class of society, it must be admitted; but are you not liable to mix with bad persons in the best regulated companies? Even robberies have frequently been committed in churches; and if you keep aloof from mankind on that account, you may soon become a crying philosopher, afraid to stir from your own fireside, in order to prevent contamination, and be devoured by hypochondria the remainder of your days.
The writer had a few drinks before arriving and is thus in a good mood:
It was at a late hour that I entered the room, and I was in a right good humor for fun and frolic, and the scene before me, having taken a glass or two of Walker’s rich old wines, the vivifying qualities of which would almost make the dumb to chatter.
Remember "vivifying". The extra "life" provided by alcohol recurs later...[a bit about dance, a bit about costumes, and more drinking behind the cut]
Since wandering around with small lanterns in a dark room looking for people to dance with also seems like a suitable spooky, or at least entertaining, activity for Halloween balls and cotillion parties, here are another pair of cotillion figures from H. Layton Walker's Twentieth Century Cotillion Figures (Two Step Publishing Company, Buffalo, New York, 1912) that feature that very activity!
These are both simple mixer figures in which pairs of ladies and gentlemen must find their designated match, either by number or by name.
1. LANTERN FIGURE. Original description...[darkness, lanterns, and pairs of names behind the cut]
Along with masquerade and fancy dress balls and costumes, the other topic I generally include in October is suitably wacky cotillion figures, dance party games that could be part of the final section of a ball or of a stand-alone event. Most of them are simple mixers, but I have a gleeful passion for the stranger ones that involve costumes or props or simply strike me as delightfully weird. Here are a couple of the latter, both taken from H. Layton Walker's Twentieth Century Cotillion Figures (Two Step Publishing Company, Buffalo, New York, 1912).
1. Human Palm Trees. Original description...[details, plus pussy willows, chenille birds, and bird whistles, behind the cut...]
On March 18, 1876, the Morning Herald of Wilmington, Delaware, published a short blurb covering a recent "masquerade party" given by one Professor Webster at the Dancing Academy Hall. Unusually, the newspaper coverage says nothing about the costumes other than that there were enough of them to "have exhausted a first class costumer’s establishment, and have taxed the ingenuity of an artist." Instead, we get an actual dance program, consisting entirely of quadrilles, Lanciers, and glide waltzes, and accompanied by names which might be masquerade costumes, though I'm not certain of that.
Professor Webster was a long-time Wilmington dancing master - he was still teaching as late as June 4, 1899, when the Sunday Morning Star reported on the closing reception of his current series of dance classes (see about two-thirds of the way down the first column here.)
Here's the list of dances, in order.
A promenade of 15 minutes, presumably the Grand March, followed by a polka.
1. Quadrille, plain, Des Layton, No. 100, Thatcher
2. Waltz Glide, Flag of Truce, White
3. Quadrille, Lanciers, Tin Fiddle, Hildreth
4. Quadrille, plain, Jigiana, Cleland
5. Quadrille Polka, Mary’s Lamb, Osborne
6. Waltz, Glide, Old Mother Goose, McIntire
7. Quadrille, Robinson, Fandango, Aiken
8. Quadrille, blain [sic], Auld Lang Syne, Burk
9. Quadrille, Polacca, breakdown, Stidham
10. Waltz, Glide, Timber Heels, Simmons
11. Quadrille, Mazourka, Red, White and Blue, Grant
12. Quadrille, plain, Lunatic, Pierson
13. Quadrille, varieties, La Manayunk
14. Waltz, glide. Spring Chicken, Vanderbreak
15. Quadrille, plain, Piccodilly [sic], Mose
15. [sic] Lanciers, Shoddy, McCall
17. Waltz, glide, Go, Lang...[breakdown and confusion behind the cut]
A Few Friends, by Korman Lynn, was serialized in nine parts in Godey's Lady's Book during the year 1864. The serial doesn't have a lot of plot; it describes eight evenings of a group of friends gathering together to, for the most part, play parlor games. It's great for anyone who wants to research mid-nineteenth century parlor games, which are described in elaborate detail, but the only section of any real interest to me is the final one, in which the friends gather for a fancy dress party.
To pick up the story at this point, it is only necessary to know that the kind and generous Ben Stykes has been quietly pursuing the lively Mary Gliddon from the beginning of the story, though a certain Mr. Hedges, a young man from Liverpool, is also interested in her.
Even a single part of the story is too long for me to transcribe here, but I'll quote the costume descriptions, some of which are detailed and unusual, and the resolution of the romance...[costume descriptions and mistaken identity behind the cut]
On Saturday, September 9, 1865, The New York Times published an account of a fancy dress "hop" given by the ladies of Cozzens' Hotel in West Point, New York, home of the famous U. S. Military Academy.
Cozzens', established in 1849, was a prominent hotel near the Academy. The original building was destroyed by fire in the March of 1861 but quickly rebuilt. The image below is a late-nineteenth-century print by Max Egalu of the view of the Hudson River from the hotel; the original is in the collection of the Boston Public Library.
With its ready supply of eager cadets from the Academy, Cozzens' was a popular site for dances. In 1859, an article in Harper's Weekly explained that:
"...the rigors of military etiquette are mitigated thrice a week by balls or hops, which are given by the cadets to their friends and guests at Cozzens’s Hotel and elsewhere in the neighborhood. These gay parties are justly famed among the fair sex; for better and more indefatigable dancers than the cadets are not to be found even in New York. Pretty girls who go to West Point to spend a few days in the bracing air, and enjoy the lovely Hudson scenery, invariably declare that they never enjoyed any ball in their life so much as the Cadet Hops." --- Harper's Weekly, September 3, 1859 The article was accompanied by an engraving of such a "hop", specifically described as "a scene familiar to the happy people who spend summer days at Cozzens's at West Point."
The original may be seen at archive.org (engraving, article). A more detailed history of the hotel may be found at The News of the Highlands....[costume list behind the cut]
Welcome to October: masquerade and fancy dress month on Kickery!
To start things off on a different note, let's look at some of the anti-masquerade sentiment found in the early years of America. Full transcriptions of the articles cited may be found at the end of the post.
On December 22, 1794, the Gazette of the United States and daily evening advertiser (Philadelphia) published an "extract of a letter from an American Gentleman in London" dated December 20th. This might or might not have been a genuine letter, as opposed to editorial-moralizing-disguised-as-correspondence, but it represented the conservative sentiment about masquerades in what was at the time the capital city of the young United States. Naturally, the English were still attending such shocking entertainments, providing the convenient opportunity to run a titillating description for their readers.
The gentleman, upon entering the masquerade, at first found his situation "awkward" and felt "sensations, bordering upon disagreeable". But, realizing his anonymity,
"...the apparent ease of all around me; the intoxicating strains of the well adapted music, and above all the indescribably contagious influence of the place; set me free from every restraint, and gave my soul the same riotous sense of pleasure, which seemed to have full possession of all around me."
Above left is an 1811 English drawing of a masquerade (click to enlarge) by prominent caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson; you can see the "freedom from restraint" in the prominent "HORNS TO SELL" sign (suggesting a volunteer for cuckoldry) and the man in the red domino at far right about to pinch the derrière of the cross-dressed woman in yellow. The women's small half-masks are obvious, but some (possibly all) of the apparent faces, particularly the bearded and long-nosed ones, were also masks. The anonymity of masks was, theoretically, the difference between a masquerade and a fancy dress ball, which involved costumes without masks. This difference could get somewhat blurry, especially with costumes that worked as disguises...[more behind the cut]
Life continues on in pandemic time, which feels like a cross between time flying by and a sort of vague timelessness.
October will be a quiet teaching month for me while I work on a new research project for a festival next month, but I have a new double series of California-based basic country dance footwork classes this month before we probably take a break over the holiday period....[details behind the cut]
Well, I had hoped to be moving back to Russia this month as usual, but it's clearly not to be. So, online lessons continue. September is going to be a (relatively) lively month for me, bookended by a lecture and class at a Russia-based festival at the beginning of the month and wrapping up with a pair of USA-based lectures at the end. In between, my double series of California-based basic country dance footwork classes continues...[details behind the cut]
Louisa May Alcott is one of those authors I enjoyed much more as a child, when the more treacly moralizing elements of her most popular books flew right over my head. As an adult, I find it harder to tolerate, an opinion that Alcott evidently shared. So I'd only ever revisited one of them -- Little Women, of course -- for its dance references. But I was nonetheless quite intrigued to read last month that a newly-discovered early story fragment by Alcott, dated 1849, when she was only seventeen, and containing a masquerade ball scene, would be published in the next issue of Strand Magazine, dated February-May 2020 but being released, no doubt for pandemic-related reasons, in late June. I promptly ordered a copy, which finally turned up in the mail this week.
As noted, Aunt Nellie's Diary is only a fragment, around nine thousand words, and ending, literally, in mid-sentence: "I begged and prayed she would..." The story is set up fully, however, and the general direction is clear: the orphaned Annie and her friend Isabel come to stay with Annie's Aunt Nellie, along with the handsome Edward, who is recovering from illness. Annie is gentle and innocent; Isabel is both colder and more flirtatious. Edward is too good to be true. Isabel is interested in Edward, but he is clearly smitten by Annie. It seems obvious that they would have ended up together, while Isabel likely would have repented of her less-than-perfect ways and wound up with the fiancé she had jilted before the story began, who reappears dramatically at the masquerade ball just before the fragment ends. This is very like far too much of the other nineteenth-century women's fiction I periodically wade through looking for dance references, though even at seventeen, Alcott is a noticeably better writer than most...[costumes but not much dance behind the cut]
Keeping with the foxtrot theme, here's one more little sequence for foxtrot or one-step from Edna Stuart Lee's Thirty Fox Trot Steps(New York, 1916). Despite its overt simplicity, it actually manages to present a minor reconstruction issue! As for the name...well, to be perfectly honest, I see absolutely no connection here to the minuet, any more than I do with Newman's Minuet Tango. There seems to have been some concept of "minuet" in the 1910s which I have completely failed to grasp.
The gentleman's steps are given; the lady dances opposite. The dancers begin in normal ballroom hold, the gentleman facing forward along line of dance and the lady backward...[details behind the cut]
For no reason other than habit, June is always foxtrot month for me, and despite the general shutdown of dance classes, I'm lucky enough to have a convenient partner at hand for experimentation with new variations. So let's look at yet another of the many step-sequences described in Edna Stuart Lee's Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916)!
The Pavlowa Extension was, of course, named for the famous ballerina Anna Pavlowa (Pavlova), who toured America in the mid-1910s and dipped into social dance choreography with a music-composition contest resulting in a trio of dances published in The Ladies' Home Journal in early 1915. She (or her ghostwriter) and (supposedly) members of her troupe also offered opinions and suggestions about dancing the one-step, Boston, and foxtrot. This variation, however, is not among those even indirectly associated with Pavlova. It probably was merely named in her honor, or perhaps was inspired by a characteristic movement in her dancing.
Lee described this as "an easy step, and very graceful, savoring a little of the stage." She also connected it to the hesitation waltz which involved a similar slight lift while hesitating: "The hesitation, while it lasted, was full of such steps and they were much appreciated." The half-and-half was another dance that used a similar technique to fill time.
The variation is done in a normal closed ballroom hold, facing line of dance. The gentleman's steps are given below; the lady dances opposite except as noted...[details, and exceptions, behind the cut]
As I slowly regain my footing in this new pandemic world, I am beginning to schedule online events of various sorts. It's not as rewarding as teaching or lecturing in person, but given the worldwide emergency and the extreme risk of in-person dancing right now, it's the best we can do.
Note that the events below are being hosted in different cities (and countries!) in different time zones - please remember to adjust times for your own time zone before planning online attendance!
There will be some updates to the events below and possibly a couple of other events added later in the month; check back mid-month for more information...[interview/discussion and festival behind the cut]
And...here's the "United Six" dance card that inspired me to write about "Roy's Wife"!
The back of the card (click to enlarge) gives the printer as "Danvers Mirror Print", a printing company located in Danvers, Massachusetts (formerly Salem Village, of the famous Salem witchcraft trials) in the late nineteenth century. The date on the front of the card, April 2, 1879, called "Fast Eve" confirms the Massachusetts connection -- in 1879, April third was proclaimed Fast Day, a day of "fasting, humiliation, and prayer" by then-Governor Thomas Talbot. His original proclamation may be seen at the Boston Atheneum Digital Collections.
Sadly, there is no further information about the location of the ball on the card, and I have not been inspired to do a lengthy search. When the card was originally posted on Facebook, it was speculated that the ball was held by six local Masonic Lodges; I have no evidence one way or the other for that.
Fast Days in the young United States could be proclaimed anytime, but a springtime Fast Day was an ongoing tradition in many New England states in the nineteenth century. The day was officially religious in nature, and at least one Fast Day sermon from 1879, "The Future of New England", by noted minister Edward Everett Hale of the South Congregational Church. was later published and may be read here.
Not everyone's mind was solely focused on religion, however. The Pilot, a Boston-area Catholic newspaper, reported on March 22nd that the St. Mary's Young Men's Temperance Society, Bunker Hill District, would hold "an interesting exhibition of gymnastics on Fast Day" and on April 12th that members of St. Augustine's Lyceum had held a "Pedestrian Contest", a series of footraces, that day. In 1894, Massachusetts, perhaps bowing to the inevitable, converted Fast Day into Patriot's Day (April 19th), commemorating several battles -- most famously, those of Lexington and Concord...[discussion of dances behind the cut]
The Vienna, or La Viennoise, is a late nineteenth century schottische variant which originated in America and traveled to France with the inimitable George Washington Lopp, though it's not clear to me whether it had much (or any) popularity there or, for that matter, in America.
My first American source for the dance was, unsurprisingly, M. B. Gilbert's Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890), which collected a wide assortment of the couple dances of the 1870s and 1880s. Gilbert and Lopp (in La Danse, 1903) agreed on how the Vienna was danced. Going with Gilbert's description, giving the gentleman's steps (lady dances opposite):
The Vienna (four measures of 4/4 schottische music)
(joining right hands with partner, facing the opposite direction)1b Slide-cut-leap-hop forward, starting left, raising right to fourth on the hop
1b Repeat, starting on right foot
1b Slide left to side (1), close right to left (2), leap back onto left (&), slide right to side (3), close left to right (4)
1b Repeat, starting on right foot, leaping forward
Lopp mostly agreed, though he had the final repeat also leaping backward, which I believe to have been an editing error, since his instructions are otherwise almost word-for-word from Gilbert, translated into French.
There are...some problems with this...[and I talk about them behind the cut]
One of the dull but necessary tasks I do as a dance historian, right up/down there with reading terrible Victorian novels for their dance references, is comparing different editions of the same book to see what changed over time. Most of these comparisons aren't as exciting as, say, Dance Mad, which underwent enormous changes in less than a year in its second edition. But they're still useful for very fine-grained dance tracking, particularly in 1914 when things were changing very rapidly and the tango, maxixe, foxtrot, and half and half either originated or were enjoying bursts of popularity. And that's before even getting to the fad dances like the Lulu Fado, the Ta Tao, and the Furlana.
Comparing two editions of Caroline Walker's The Modern Dances is pretty tame in comparison, since the changes are mostly just in pagination and arrangement of photos, but it's still a useful window into how rapidly things were changing in 1914.
For reference, here are the known editions with their very helpful specific dates:
First - January 27, 1914
Second - February 12,1914
Third - March 20, 1914
That's impressively fast! The second and third editions were only five weeks apart, but apparently the major change, the addition of the Argentine Tango, was important enough to warrant not just an added section but also renumbering of the illustrations and having a few rephotographed completely to alter the recommended positions.
I own a copy of the second edition, and the third edition is available at the Library of Congress website. I have never seen a copy of the first edition, so I will be comparing only the second and third...[with a fine-toothed comb, behind the cut]
Here's a 1966 sitting-down dance that is clearly a direct descendant of the late 1950s hand jive: Table Talk, published in a dance manual that was a tie-in to the musical variety television series Hullabaloo. The series ran from 1965 to early 1966 on American television channel NBC, amassing an impressive lineup of stars as hosts and performances by major musical acts (including The Rolling Stones, Sonny and Cher, and The Supremes).
An important element of the show was a dance troupe, choreographed by multi-talented actor-director-dancer-choreographer David Winters (among many other things, he originated the role of A-Rab in West Side Story (1957) and was recast in the 1961 film as well) called the Hullabaloo Dancers. They were a talented group whose alumni included Michael Bennett and Donna McKechnie, choreographer/director and star (Cassie), respectively, of the 1975 Broadway musical, A Chorus Line. There's a video of the Hullabaloo dancers here. The video quality is poor, but their skill shines through. They still have a dedicated Facebook fan page, and a "reconstruction" of Hullabaloo was briefly featured with Leonardo DiCaprio in the 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood - the clip may be seen here...[the connection to social dance and an actual reconstruction behind the cut]
Over the last few years in Moscow, I've spent a fair amount of time at balls and parties outside the strictly-historical community and had a chance to observe, and occasionally dance, some of the choreographed dances developed during the Soviet era as well as some which were introduced in the 1990s and early 2000s, either by Russian choreographers or by foreign teachers, and adopted into the community culture of young Moscow dancers who mix historical, modern, and traditional dances at their balls. It would be a fascinating project to try to determine the origins of all these dances, though I don't plan on taking it up myself, since my Russian language skills really aren't up to the task.
One of the challenges in tracing such dances back very far is that over time they become folk-processed, evolving as they move through communities, until it can be difficult to determine which movements are native to the dance and which have merely accreted over time. I've become intrigued enough with one dance to make some effort, however. It appears to have originated in the late 1970s, though I haven't been able to discover the choreographer. After some multilingual digging, I've been lucky enough to turn up three Soviet-era video recordings of performances outside the USSR which I believe depict the authentic dance, including the different steps and variations for men and women. Ironically, the best sources appear to be in German, which is true for many nineteenth century dances as well.
I'm going to take a look here specifically at the women's steps, which can be performed solo or with a female partner, with or without a group of men dancing their steps simultaneously. At some later point I might work on the men's footwork as well...[detailed reconstruction and notes behind the cut]
Perhaps this should be more accurately called the non-gig calendar. Due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, I am home from Moscow and back in Connecticut and, needless to say, all upcoming events and lessons are canceled. Like everyone else, I've no idea when things will return to normal.
I am considering doing online lectures or short dance lessons...[request for ideas behind the cut]
The Dream Waltz appeared in Caroline Walker's book The Modern Dances, three editions of which appeared in the year 1914. Her Dream Waltz appeared in at least the second and third editions; the latter is available online here. Another Dream...
"The Gaby Glide" was a piece of music written as a star turn for dancers Gaby Deslys and Harry Pilcer in the Broadway operetta Vera Violetta, which opened in New York in November, 1911. The famous and popular Deslys was...
I'm having a ball! Literally, a ball! In Moscow! In Russian and English! Mixing all sorts of crazy dancing together!
I'll be doing other things this month too, but holding a ball in Moscow is something I've wanted to do for years, so I'm dipping my toe in with a small, beginner-friendly event. Details and links to the ball prep classes will appear later in the month - check back for updates...[ball and other things behind the cut]
Happy new year! January is going to be a tough month, as I'm having to move to a new flat, which is a challenging task in Moscow. But I'll still have a few events here and there! Hopefully normal life will return in February...[details behind the cut]
Original photo: Barry Lewis
The photo at left (click to enlarge) was taken in June, 2018, at the Laws Railroad Museum and Historic Site in Bishop, California. I've cropped it to focus on the dance program board shown, which is hanging in the music room there. It gives a program that probably dates from around 1910. Most of the dances were well-known couple dances, plus (of course!) the quadrille, which was probably the first set or a called quadrille. I've discussed some of the others, such as the Rye Waltz, the Newport, and some versions of the Paul Jones, on Kickery in the past. There's some mystery about what exactly would have been danced for the minuet -- the Oxford Minuet? One of the choreographed "waltz minuets"? A Menuet de la Cour?
But to me, the most interesting puzzle on there is what exactly was meant by a "Four Step".
In the 1900s and early 1910s, there were sequences called the four-step in several different dances -- a four-step Boston, a four-step grapevine, a four-step in the tango, etc. I don't really envision any of those to have been listed as a separate dance, however. Noted dance historian Richard Powers stated in a Facebook comment on the photo that the four-step was an early name for the one-step, though I don't know how common that usage was, since I have not come across it myself. But it's not the only possibility. Let's look at a few of the others...[four other options behind the cut]
Over the twelve years I've been writing Kickery, I've twice discussed versions of Sir Roger de Coverley, the English "finishing dance" that was the direct ancestor of America's Virginia Reel: a Regency-era version from Thomas Wilson and a Victorian-era version probably originated by Mrs. Nicholas Henderson. The latter version of the dance, which shortened the figures and added an introductory figure for all the dancers, appeared in several English sources from around 1850 to 1870. But it was not the only version in mid-nineteenth century England; at least two variations of a full version more like the Regency one continued to appear in dance manuals, and a fourth version, shortened even further, turned up occasionally as well. The dance being strongly associated with Christmas due to its appearance at Mr. Fezziwig's ball in Charles Dickens' 1843 novel, A Christmas Carol, Christmas Eve seems an appropriate time to discuss this extremely short version...[reconstruction and sources behind the cut]
In the mid-1820s, London dancing master G. M. S. Chivers published two additional sets of "Caledonians" figures, over and above his first set of Caledonians, which became the standard nineteenth-century version. The second set has some appealing variations in the figures: alternating half-figures for head and side couples; solos for both gentlemen and ladies in separate figures; a "meanwhile" figure to occupy the less-active couples; and a demi-grande-chaîne figure broken into quarters by extra full turns. There's nothing too exotic, but it's a fun little set, fairly straightforward to reconstruct and easy to dance for anyone with general experience with Regency-era quadrille steps and figures. I'll include the first couple of figures below and follow up with the remainder in a second post.
A note about music: my only source for Chivers' Second Set of Caledonians is his Dancing Master in Miniature (c1825), which gave figures only, no music. I have not, so far, found the specifically published sheet music for them. Given the degree to which sets of quadrille figures were recycled for different sets of tunes during the nineteenth century, I would not feel at all uncomfortable about dancing them to more-or-less random sets of Scottish music, either from another published set of Scottish-themed quadrilles or assembled from period Scottish tunes. The length and repeat structure of the figures matches the standard "first set" of quadrilles.
On to the figures...[first and second figures behind the cut]
December will be a quite month of hibernation, research, and private lessons and classes. The dance series at the American Center at the U. S. Embassy will continue with one regular dance and a holiday party...[details of mostly private events behind the cut]
Late nineteenth-century American dance manuals are littered with Polacca quadrilles, comprising at least three distinct sets of figures plus variations. For this series of posts, I'm going to focus on the set of figures advertised as taught by Professor Asher of Philadelphia. I have at least six sources for this set of figures, none of which are completely consistent with each other, which makes it difficult to come up with an absolutely definitive reconstruction.
The music for this Polacca set was composed by William Coleman and published as early as 1857, when it appeared in Shuster's flute music, published in Philadelphia, which is online here. That is considerably earlier than any evidence I have for Asher's figures; the earliest source I have for any version of them is dated 1870. A Polacca appeared on dance cards from Professor Asher's academy in late 1878 and early 1879. It seems likely that the figures danced were Asher's own, but the first definitive source I have for them is a Boston reprint of Coleman's music, dated 1881, on which the figures actually appear with a credit to Asher. I've treated this as my primary source for the figures. A detail from the cover of this music is above at left; click to enlarge.
Coleman's music was also printed in J. W. Pepper's Universal Dancing Master (1882), appearing on pages 60-62. Asher's figures, more or less, appeared separately on page 13. Variant versions of the figures also appeared in The amateur's vademecum by E. B. Reilly (Philadelphia, 1870), A treatise on the elements of dancing by the anonymous T. Erp. Sichore (San Francisco, 1891), The American prompter and guide to etiquette by E. H. Kopp (Cincinnati, 1896), and A complete practical guide to modern society dancing by Albert W. Newman (Philadelphia, 1903). Given the date of the Reilly manual, I think it possible that this variant is actually a separate version of the figures, existing in parallel with Asher's, but it's similar enough that I can't be quite certain.
Musically, "alla polacca" means in the manner of a polonaise, but the music is more waltz than polonaise. The 1881 printing is labeled "Glide, or Polacca Quadrilles", referring to a glide waltz, and the T. Erp. Sichore source called it "The Polacca or Glide Waltz Quadrille". Reilly (1870) declared that it was danced with "plain waltz step" although he stated that it required mazurka steps in two of the figures. I don't recommend actual polonaise steps for the walked part of Asher's Polacca, just small walking steps counted in threes, and, despite Reilly's comment, do not suggest mazurka steps...[figure 1 and variants behind the cut]
Photo: Andrew Trembley
The Highland Glide was the very last schottische given in M. B. Gilbert's Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890). It reappeared in George Washington Lopp's La Danse (Paris, 1903) under the name La Highland Glide (Schottisch). The dance was created by Chicago dancing master C. A. Carr, who published sheet music advertising the dance, though the copy I have scans of does not include the dance instructions. Part of the cover of the sheet music may be seen at left; click to enlarge. It is dated 1890. Carr advertised himself as the creator of the "popular" Carlton (a polka sequence which appeared in Gilbert and Lopp) as well as "famous" Newports (plural), by which I suspect he means he composed music for dancing the Newport, rather than the dance itself. Gilbert and Lopp also credited him with the Ashland (another polka), Le Beau (a galop), and the America (a mazurka).
The Highland Glide follows the common "double" schottische pattern of four measures of slow steps followed by four of faster steps, the first part with minimal turning and the second turning continuously using the typical late-nineteenth century waltz-galop step (explained here). The measure count presents a minor reconstruction issue, since the steps are notated by Gilbert and Lopp in 4/4, but the sheet music is notated in 2/4. It is fairly obvious from the rhythm and tempo given that two measures of the sheet music are what Gilbert and Lopp considered a single measure...[reconstruction and thoughts on turning behind the cut]
I'll be juggling two big trips in November - to Kyiv, Ukraine, for a ball and a day of classes, then back to the USA in November for the Remembrance Day Weekend balls and a country dance evening in Chicago! In Moscow, I'll be continuing some private lessons and doing another public dance at the American Center at the U. S. Embassy...[details behind the cut]