Capering & Kickery

Victorian Dancing with Steampunk Style (Baltimore, January 23, 2010)

A word to any Maryland-or-vicinity readers who might be willing to experiment a little with some alternate history:

I'm going to be precepting a Victorian Steampunk Ball in Baltimore this Saturday, January 23rd, 2010, as a fundraiser for research against Multiple Sclerosis.  Dancing will be creatively Victorian in style, to a mix of Victorian and modern music.  That means a mix of called set dances (contras and quadrilles) and couple dances (waltzes, polkas, schottisches).  The event will be beginner-friendly, with the set dances (1) easy and (2) taught.

For more information:

Team Greykell's blog.

Any help spreading the word would be appreciated -- this is a good cause! -- and I'd love to meet any Kickery readers who might be attending!

New York Bus Stop

I always end up reconstructing line dances when I have a relevant gig coming up.  This time it's the Dance Flurry, where I will be teaching an entire session of disco line dances a month or so from now.

This is another short line dance, only twenty-four beats long.  There are many, many dances called some version of "Bus Stop" -- it seems every city or perhaps every club had its own special one.  This is not the only dance I have found that's called the New York Bus Stop!

The source for this particular version is Let's Disco, no author given, published in 1978 by K-tel International, Inc.  It's slightly unusual in that the quarter-turns at the end of each iteration are to the right rather than to the left and occur in mid-dance rather than at the end.

A Promiscuous Figure: Flirtation

• Era: circa 1905

A while back I published a couple of posts on so-called "promiscuous figures," which may be substituted into the first set of quadrilles for variety.  The Flirtation figure is another of these, taken from English dancing master William Lamb's How and What to Dance (London, 1903), an undated New York edition of which was published in the first decade of the 20th century.

The figure is probably intended as a finale figure, replacing the usual fifth figure, since it is entirely full-set moves and finishes with a galopade, typically included in finale figures.

Flirtation Figure (8 bars + 32 bars x4 + 8 bars)
8b     Introduction (no bows if replacing a finale figure)

4b     Grand Circle (all take hands and forward and back twice)
4b     Turn partners two hands
4b     All four ladies forward and back
4b     All four gentlemen forward, turn, and bow to lady at their left (their corner lady)
4b     Chassez with corners; slide right and left, gents coming out of center and back in
4b     Turn corners two hands, ending in gentleman's original place
8b     All galopade around the set (four-slide galop to each position, alternating over hands/over elbows)

Repeat previous thirty-two bars three more times. After last repetition:
8b     Grand Circle and turn partners two hands

During each iteration of the figure, the ladies move one place counter-clockwise around the set.  The gentlemen all return to their own places, bringing a new lady with them each time.  After four times through the figure, all the ladies are back with their original partners.  There is a final eight-bar "tag" figure to end.

(Edited 7/6/2016 to add: see my later post on this figure for considerably more information!)