Capering & Kickery

Regency & Ragtime Dance Workshops, NYC (Sunday, August 2, 2009)

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

The first (1:00-3:45pm) will focus on the dances of the Regency era (1810-1820), including steps and figures for country dances and French quadrilles.  Specifically, we will dance and look at a step-sequences to use in the five figures of the First Set of French Quadrilles: Le Pantalon, L'Eté,  La Poule, La Trenise, and La Finale.  Depending on available time, we will also enjoy a Spanish Dance and an 1816 version of the classic Money Musk as well as the Scotch Reel for six and -- numbers permitting -- the amazing reel for nine people (and one hat) known as the Bumpkin.

The second class (4:00-6:00pm) will turn to the early 20th century ragtime era and will focus on the foxtrot in its very earliest versions of the 1910s, including the original walking/trotting combinations and the development of the alternating slow and quick step patterns that became the standard for the dance, as discussed here and here.

Both of the above are beginner-level classes.  No experience is needed and no partner is required, though gender balance is not guaranteed.  Clean, leather-soled flat shoes for the first class or low heels (character shoes or similar) for the ladies for the second class (no spike heels!) are recommended.

The classes are held at Dick Shea's (a capoeira studio), 104 W. 14th Street at 6th Avenue, New York City.  Ring buzzer #3, up 2 flights, first door on the right.  For more information, please email EAS.

The Regency class costs $18, or $12 for people attending for the first time; the Ragtime class costs $15.  Pay at the class.

Goucher & Newport

I'm going to be traveling to two dance events in the next week, one as a student and one as a teacher. 

On Saturday, July 25th, I will be attending a one-day historical dance workshop held by the New York Baroque Dance Company at Goucher College, near Baltimore, Maryland.  The teachers are Catherine Turocy and Richard Powers.  There will also be a country dance party in the evening, called by Catherine Turocy and Charles Garth.  This event precedes a full-week workshop at Goucher which I am unable to attend because...

...from Monday, July 27th through Saturday, August 1st, I will be at Newport Vintage Dance Week, sponsored by the Commonwealth Vintage Dancers, at Roger Williams University. near Newport, Rhode Island.  I am on the faculty for this week, and will be teaching intermediate/advanced nineteenth century couple dances: racket, schottische, and two-step.  Also on the faculty this year are Joan Walton, Marc Casslar, and Barbara Pugliese.  There will be balls in the style of the 1860s, 1890s, and 1910s as well as informal dancing in the evenings, a silent movie, and other fun historical pastimes.  This is my third year on the faculty for Newport.

I'd be happy to chat with any Kickery readers attending either event.

The problem with strict constructionism

I had the opportunity recently of dancing the early English country dance Gathering Peascods with another dance reconstructor, though I don't think he had the slightest idea that I was one as well.  Making polite conversation before the music started, I inquired idly whether he preferred to perform the dance with a clap on the third "into the center" move or not, that being a point of debate among those work with early country dances.  He fairly blazed with passion as he told me, in a tone that suggested he was not open to any such debate, that he danced it without the third clap "exactly as it says in the book."

Well, that puts me in my place, eh?

The problem with that sort of strict-constructionist approach is that in early country dances, a lot of things are not actually in the book.  So let's look at what the book actually says here.

One-Step Variations: Traveling Turns

Although the traveling turn (or "pivot," though in period that can refer to a different turn as well) is enormously popular among modern dancers of the one-step, possibly because of the notoriously lengthy string of pivots done in continuous sequence by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939), it actually does not seem to have been nearly as popular among dancing masters of the 1910s.  While the traveling turn occasionally appears in other dances, I have found a written description of its use in the one step only in Albert Newman's Dances of to-day, published in Philadelphia in 1914.  Other sources mention "whirls" or "swirls," but exactly what kind of turning these terms refer to is not specified.

Newman's description of the step is brief and uncharacteristically vague:

In order to execute these turns properly it is necessary that the dancers should be most proficient and move perfectly together.

Each foot virtually describes a semicircle (cycloid movement) upon the floor, the dancers really stepping around each other.

This is quite effective, but requires considerable practice together.

Le Klondike Two Step

Reading this morning's headlines about events in Alaska, it seems the moment to post this little French sequence dance, which can also be used to vary an early twentieth-century two-step.  I've found this sequence in only one source: La Danse, by [George] Washington Lopp, published in Paris in 1903 as part of a two-book compendium.  The smaller part (forty-five pages to the two hundred-plus of La Danse) of the compendium is a brief manual of etiquette and costume written by J. Chéron. 

Mr. Lopp seems to have been an interesting character, an American expatriate and former Chicago dancing master whose partnership in a Parisian musical conservatory went extremely sour, resulting in lawsuits, lockouts, and a "very tempestuous scene" with one of the patronesses of the conservatory, who insisted on performing a concerto she had composed.  Apparently the piece was so dreadful that the audience

was unable...to endure the entire infliction, and most of those present incontinently left after the first movement had been half finished.

While La Danse is dated 1903, I think it most likely that this dance dates to 1897 or 1898, the height of the Klondike Gold Rush.  Lopp attributes the dance to H.-N. Grant, whom Giraudet mentions in his list of dancing professors as being active in Buffalo, New York, in 1898.

Known World Dance Symposium

I'm off this weekend to a Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) event, Known World Dance Symposium VII, in Hamilton, Ontario (near Toronto).  I'm not an active SCA member, but I have very pleasant memories of the last one of these I went to, in Boston back in 2001.  I'll be there Friday through Sunday, off and on.  I'm not teaching anything, so I'm just planning to hang out with other dance geeks and do some relaxing dancing.

I'd be happy to say hi to any Kickery readers attending this event.