Capering & Kickery

The New Yorker

Another guilty-pleasure disco-era line dance!  This is one I've actually used regularly as an easy cool-down dance at the end of my own practices for the last couple of years.  The source is The Official Guide to Disco Dance Steps by Jack Villari & Kathleen Sims Villari, 1978.  There's no special music for this or any other line dance, but I often use either Wild Cherry's "Play That Funky Music, White Boy" or Donna Summers' "Bad Girls".  The only thing even mildly unusual about the dance itself is that instead of quarter-turns after each repetition there are half-turns.

Star Light, Star Bright: Reconstructing the "Star" Quadrille Figure

In his manual on quadrilles, early 19th-century (“Regency”) London dancing master Thomas Wilson wrote hopefully that his diagrams,

... together with the printed Directions appended, will enable any person, by marking the Figures on a floor, to perform them correctly without the aid of a Master.
    Thomas Wilson, The quadrille and cotillion panorama, 2nd ed., London, 1822

Quadrilles, the ancestors of the modern square dance, were popular in England from the 1810s onward, displacing the longways country dance from its former preeminence in the ballroom.  Wilson’s diagrams and directions are in fact quite helpful in deciphering many of the figures needed for the Regency-era quadrille, but he does have occasional failures, as in the figure “L’Etoile” or “The Star”.

Corte Mad

• Era: 1910s
• Dance: tango

In the interest of not losing my mind, I’m going to be writing more short posts interspersed with the longer articles that cover entire dances.  Today, a lovely little move for your 1910s tango.

Many teachers labor under the impression that the “Argentine” consists of one dance only, which is not true, it is a dance of great variety of movements…The Argentine of today embraces about as many varieties as there are dancers, owing perhaps, to the natural desire of our American dancers to be “inventors.”
    F. Leslie Clendenen, Dance Mad, or the dances of the day, St. Louis, Missouri, 1914

Hot Chocolate

I try to remember that history (dance or otherwise) didn't actually stop sometime before I was born, so today I'm flashing back to 1978 and the era of disco line dances and, happily, a flood of disco dance manuals.  I still find disco music very danceable, so ever so often I play around with reconstructing a few line dances to use as warmups or cool-downs at my own dance practices. 

Here's a simple one: Hot Chocolate.  It's only sixteen beats long, which is a very short repeat for a line dance.  This may not be the easiest line dance ever, but it's got to be high on the list!  The dance might have been inspired by the group of the same name, probably best known for the mid-'70s hit song "You Sexy Thing."  The source is Let's Disco, no author given, published in 1978 by K-tel International, Inc. 

The Mazourka Valse, commonly called the Cellarius Valse

• Era: 1840s-1870s

La valse mazurka, dite la Cellarius.  The Waltze-Mazurka, called the Cellarius.  The Mazourka Valse, commonly called the Cellarius Valse. La Cellarius.  The dance is described repeatedly and variously in dance manuals from the 1840s through the 1870s, generally referred to by the name of its composer, famed Parisian dancing master Henri Cellarius.

The mazurka proper was brought from Eastern Europe to the fashionable ballrooms of Paris and London in the early decades of the nineteenth century.  The original form of the mazurka was that of an improvised quadrille, with one gentleman in the set calling the figures on the spot and the other couples following his lead.  The difficulty of the steps combined with that of finding enough skilled dancers to make up a set was seen as overwhelming.  One popular solution was pre-choreographed quadrilles, which several dancing masters composed, but as London dance teacher Mrs. Nicholas Henderson noted in her early 1850s dance manual:

...a Quadrille requiring eight persons or four couples to dance it, and the figures of the Mazourka being extremely intricate and too difficult for private parties, the idea suggested itself to M. Cellarius, of Paris, to change the form of the dance, and convert the Quadrille into a Valse, preserving the original step.  This was no sooner done than it became the fureur of the Parisian circles, and it received the name of the Cellarius Valse, in compliment to the composer, although the proper name is the Mazourka Valse, in contradistinction to the Mazourka Quadrille.

The Overlooked Eight Step

• Era: 1910s
• Dances: one-step, tango, half & half, hesitation waltz

Why, in fifteen-plus years of dancing ragtime socially, had I never done the eight step?  It's not an obscure step; it's the first variation world-famous dance couple Vernon and Irene Castle give for the one-step and is also mentioned by them in their descriptions of the tango, half and half, and hesitation waltz.  And yet somehow I'd neither danced it nor reconstructed it until late 2007 when I was looking for interesting one-step moves for some new dance students.

How Many Times Do We Play That Tune?

One of those questions I get asked all the time by musicians and others is "how many times through the tune for this dance?"  The reference is to progressive longways country dances, which were the dominant social dance form in Europe and America from the mid-17th century through the early 19th century and are still enjoying widespread popularity in various living tradition and revival forms.

Modern English country dance and contra practice is for all couples to start the dance simultaneously, and the modern answer to the repeats question would be as many times as needed for everyone to enjoy the dance and fewer times than it would take for people to get bored.  Modern Scottish (RSCDS) practice differs in that their dances are generally performed in short sets and have a fixed number of repeats.  But if you truly wish to perform country dances in the historical style, it's a bit more complex!