Era: 1880s-early 1900s, New England & Paris
The so-called Polish Galop, which is neither Polish nor necessarily a galop, is one of those odd little variations that was the creation of a single dancing master and was not generally taken up by others. It is not Polish in origin; the name comes from the heel-clicking move it incorporates, which is typical of Polish dances such as the mazurka. Its creator, Maine dancing master and author M.B. Gilbert, explains in Round Dancing, published in 1890, that
The movements of this dance were arranged by me for special use in children's classes, and I found the combination a pleasant innovation.
I also found it pleasant; it's actually slightly less "busy" than a regular galop. And its ambiguity on where the turn (if any) happens is interestingly similar to that of the racket.
The steps of the variation are quite simple:
First part: heel clicks
(two measures)
1 Step or leap onto the left foot
2 Hop on the left foot, striking the heels together
3 Step onto the right foot
4 Hop on the right foot, striking the heels together
Second part: slides and hop
(two measures)
1 Slide left foot to the side
&2 Close right to left; slide left again
&3 Close right to left; slide left again
4 Hop on left foot
Repeat both parts on opposite feet (four measures)
I find it helpful in the first part to think of the heel-click as being done on the "&" so that the hop actually lands on the second beat. When first learning the Polish Galop one could start with simply step-hopping and add the click later when the pattern of the variation is solidly in muscle memory. My mnemonic is:
"step-click-hop, step-click-hop, slide-close-slide-close-slide, hop"
Though it is not in the description of the dance, I find the impulse to also click the heels on the final hop difficult to resist.
What is interesting is what Gilbert doesn't say: whether it turns, and if so, where. There are several possible ways to do the Polish Galop, with the hops making it extremely easy to change the angle at which the dancers are moving across the floor:
- the first part along and against the line of dance, with the second part sliding on the line of dance and then turning halfway on the final slide and hop.
- zigzagging across the line of dance (no turns) with the leader facing forward
- the same, but with the leader's back to the line of dance
- the first part done zigzagging across the line of dance, then angling so that the sliding sequence is done along line of dance with a half-turn at the end; the leader faces line of dance in the first iteration and on the repeat is facing against line of dance
- the same, but without the half-turns
- alternating among all or some of the above
While many descriptions of the racket note specifically that it does not turn fully, Gilbert's silence on the Polish Galop could suggest either that the turn was too obvious to need mentioning or that it doesn't occur at all. More than a century later, we can only guess. My choice would be to take advantage of the ambiguity and choose "all of the above."
But is it a galop?
While the Polish galop is given as a galop variation and thus presumably intended to be danced at galop speed, it could conceivably be done at a slower tempo as a schottische variation. It matches schottische music nicely and has the characteristic "step-hop" move of that dance. Its rhythm pattern of 1234 1&2&34 also matches that of other late nineteenth-century schottisches, such as the "gavotte" variations previously discussed, that break up the regular A/B pattern of the earlier schottische.
Other references to the Polish Galop
The only other place I have found this variation is in La Danse, by Washington Lopp, published in Paris in 1903. Lopp's manual consists in large part of Gilbert's manual translated into French, and he attributes "Le Polonais Galop" to Gilbert.
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