Continuing to work my way through late nineteenth-century jig-time (6/8-time) dances, here's one attributed to New York dancing master C. H. Rivers (left) but found not in Rivers' own dance manual, but in the "Miscellaneous Dances" section at the back of M. B. Gilbert's 1890 tome, Round Dancing, as well as in American expatriate Washington Lopp's 1903 French translation and expansion of Gilbert, La Danse.
"Le rêve" is French for "dream." Gilbert leaves off the circumflex for "Le Reve", but Lopp, as would be expected for someone writing in French, includes it. I have no information about the source of the name. Possibly it was named after a particular piece of music, or the name might simply be a romantic fancy. Gilbert states that dance was adopted by the American Society of professors of Dancing, New York, on September 4th, 1889, which dating explains its absence from Rivers' own work, published in Brooklyn around 1885.
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