Capering & Kickery

Regency & Victorian Dance Workshops, NYC (March 2, 2008)

I will be teaching two dance workshops for The Elegant Arts Society in New York City this Sunday, March 2nd.  Logistical details are here.

The first (1:00-3:45pm) will focus on the dances of the Regency era (1810-1820), including both steps and figures for country dances and the Caledonian Quadrilles plus a look at the lively sauteuse waltz.

The second class (4:00-6:00pm) will cover the basic ballroom dances of the 1880s in preparation for an upcoming EAS event, the Victorian Bustle Ball on March 29th, which I will be precepting.  Included will be the waltz, polka, and schottische, plus the Polo Quadrille and the "star" figure described in an earlier article here, in the form of a polka cotillion figure (German).

Bits of Bijou: The Missing Middle of Durang's 1848 Manual

Research on social dance history does not always involve direct work on specific dances, and occasionally I get diverted to detective work on related historical mysteries in different fields - music, language, biography, etiquette, publishing history, and more.  Over the last few weeks, I have pursued a successful quest for some pages missing from an 1840s work by Charles Durang.  The process of locating these pages illustrates some of the frustrations of working with 19th century sources and the care needed in studying them.

In her delightful overview of 19th-century dance and etiquette, From the Ballroom to Hell, Elizabeth Aldrich states that Durang (1796-1870) was a dancer at the Bowery Theatre who later taught dance in Philadelphia with his daughter Caroline and published at least four dance manuals.  I started looking for a copy of Durang’s The Ball-Room Bijou and Art of Dancing as part of the research for a particular set of quadrilles and rapidly found myself in the midst of a publication puzzle.

It was not particularly difficult to track down a copy of Bijou – the University of California has a copy in its collection, which has conveniently been digitized by Google. But, to my dismay, that copy appeared to be missing its middle: the page numbering jumped abruptly from page 50 to page 113 and then skipped from page 155 over to the final page, 158.  While the complete description of the set of quadrilles I was researching was included in the available pages, I was both hopeful of more details on some of the steps in the missing pages and just plain annoyed at not having the complete work.  I assumed the California copy was damaged and over time the pages had simply been lost, so I took advantage of a planned trip to the New York Public Library to look over their collection of Durang, including three separate copies of Bijou, in quest of the missing pages.

Two Branles d'Escosse (Branles of Scotland)

• Era: mid-1500s

When Thoinot Arbeau (pseudonym of Jehan Tabourot) published his book of dances, Orchésographie (available in English translation as Orchesography), in the late 1580s, he described "regional" branles for Poitou, Brittany, and Scotland.  It is not clear whether the two Branles d'Escosse (literally "Branles of Scotland" but colloquially known as the Scottish Branles) he gives, the first and second in a suite of unknown length, were actually imported from Scotland, or merely a romantic French conception of what the Scots were doing.  The timing is suggestive: Arbeau described the Branles d'Escosse as having been "en vogue" around twenty years before, which would place them in the 1560s, soon after the marriage of the teenaged Mary Stuart to the future François II in 1558 and their brief reign from 1559-1560, though since Mary had been raised in France from the age of five, it seems unlikely that she personally introduced these dances!  Music still exists (published by Pierre Attaignant) for other suites of Branles d'Escosse, but no further dance instructions have come to light.

This pair of branles is choreographically notable in being the only standard branles to use the pied croisé (shown to the left) in which the free foot is crossed in front during a hop.  (There are grèves croisées in Arbeau's Gavottes, but those are atypical for other reasons.)

From the Tourdion to the Tango (February 17, 2008)

Rather last minute, but if any of my readers are in New York City, I will be doing some dance commentary at a concert by the New York Consort of Viols tomorrow afternoon at 3:00 p.m. in Manhattan.  A flier is here.  The music will primarily be 14th-18th century dance music as well as some period and modern pieces inspired by dance music.  My comments will be popularly oriented rather than academic - brief introductory remarks in between pieces, not a lecture.

One Year Later (In Memoriam)

One year ago today, I hugged my dear friend, teacher, and mentor, Patri Pugliese, good-bye and walked out the door to run a Regency-era tea dance.  The dance was remarkably successful, but when I came back to tell him about it, he was gone.

Yesterday, I ran the same dance.  It was even more successful this year.  I will never again have the joy of sharing my dance accomplishments with Patri, but today, in his memory, I'm going to talk about three lessons I learned from him about dance reconstruction.

How to Dance the Early Schottische

• Era: 1850s-1870s

A short, performance-oriented summary for those who want to skip the background and just go out and schottische.  This is intended as a summary for those already generally familiar with couple dancing, not as a way for new dancers to learn from scratch; a live teacher is always to be preferred to a written description.

A fuller discussion of and list of sources for the schottische may be found in The Early Schottische.

The Early Schottische

• Era: 1850s-1870s

Origins of the Schottische
One of the most popular couple dances of the mid- to late 19th century, the schottische first began appearing in dance manuals in the 1850s.  The noted Parisian dance teacher Cellarius, writing in the late 1840s, did not mention it at all.  In Markowski et ses salons, a gossipy look at the Parisian demi-monde published in 1860, it is claimed that Polish dancer and Parisian dancing master Markowski invented "la scottish" (among many other dances, including the Hongroise) during a period of dire poverty but great choreographic creativity in the 1850s.  The picture of the great dancer creating dances in his lonely Parisian garret has charm but in the case of the schottische seems unlikely to be accurate.