Capering & Kickery

Dance Card: Improved Order of Red Men, 1881

I am not a big collector of dance cards, but occasionally I buy one or get given one as a gift.  I plan to post them occasionally as examples of the order of dances at actual balls of their eras. 

This dance card, for a "Public Installation" of the Improved Order of Red Men, is dated January 6, 1881, and is divided between the a ceremony for a fraternal order and the following ball.  (Click to enlarge the front cover image at left.)

The Improved Order of Red Men is still in existence and claims a history going back as far as 1765 and a descent from the Sons of Liberty who perpetrated, in Mohawk disguise, the Boston Tea Party in 1773.  The current name dates from 1834.  Details of the order's history may be found on its website.  Two of the three "tribes" (local organizations) listed seem still to be in existence, though perhaps not in the same cities: Red Cloud (Indianapolis) and Minnewa (Philadelphia).  Polmete seems to have vanished.

The Royal Lancers, Figure 5

The fifth and final figure of the Royal Lancers/Horse Guards quadrille for sixteen is actually not a very radical departure from the fifth figure of the usual Lancers.  The only real change is replacing the opening grand chain with a less elegant right hands across/left hands back done by all eight ladies together.  The only virtue of this change is that this figure fits the standard music, which a grand chain of sixteen people would not.  The rest of the figures are really no more than a typical fifth figure performed side by side but separately by two groups of four couples.

Please refer to the first post in this series, here, for the diagram showing the formation of the Royal Lancers, with each pair of numbered couples (first/first, second/second, etc.) being located diagonally across the set from each other.

The Royal Lancers, Figure 4

Moving right along with the Royal Lancers quadrille for sixteen: the fourth figure is the first figure to really take full advantage of the large-square format, with each repetition bringing the active couples (heads or sides) exactly halfway around the square to the diagonally opposite position.  In this, it has more in common with the fourth figure of Allen Dodworth's later New York Lancers (here) than with that the standard Lancers, a version of which is described in the same post.

The formation for the Royal Lancers is shown in the first post in this series, here; reference to that diagram will be useful in sorting out the perambulations of the various couples.

The Royal Lancers, Figure 3

Proceeding through the Royal Lancers quadrille for sixteen, the third figure incorporates choreographic adaptations to the larger square similar to those made in the first two figures.  Once again, moves that are usually done by the head or side couples together are divided, but this time in a way which harks back to the oldest form of the Lancers, with the figures led in turn by each lady and her opposite.  The ladies chain for four couples is then modified into four ladies chains for two couples each, to suit the large-square formation.

A direct comparison with the third figure of the original Lancers may be made via my post on the third figure of the New York Lancers, here.  The formation for the Royal Lancers is shown in the first post in this series, here.

The Royal Lancers, Figure 2

Continuing on from my previous post covering the first figure of the Royal Lancers quadrille for sixteen, here is the second figure.  Once again, moves that are usually done by the head or side couples together are divided so that the first couples move during the first time through, the second couples during the second, and so forth.  A more substantial alteration is that rather than the side couples (in the first two repetitions) dividing to form lines of four at the heads and those lines going forward and back followed by a two-hand turn to places, the Royal Lancers takes advantage of the ready-made lines of four along each side of the set and allows both the head and side lines to advance and retire sequentially, skipping the two-hand turn to places entirely.

Comparison with the second figure of the original Lancers may be made via my post on the second figure of the New York Lancers, here.

The Royal Lancers, Figure 1

Era: American, 1860s onward

There are several "sixteen Lancers" quadrilles, written for eight couples rather than four, many of which adopt similar solutions in adapting the figures to twice as many couples.  The Royal Lancers, or Horse Guards, is a version that I have found in only two sources: Thomas Hillgrove's 1863 A Complete Practical Guide to the Art of Dancing and Professor M.J. Koncen's 1883 Quadrille Call Book and Ball Room Guide.  The diagram at the left (click to enlarge), taken from Hillgrove, shows the arrangement of couples for the Royal Lancers.  Note that the odd-numbered couples on each side are to the right of the even-numbered ones.  Koncen provides a similar diagram but misnumbers two of the couples.

The figures of the Royal Lancers are only minor variations on the standard Lancers ones, but the multiplier effect of doing the figures with twice as many couples makes even the simplest figures substantially more interesting.  For the most part, the Royal Lancers may be danced to any Lancers music, but note that there are both 20-bar and 24-bar versions of Figure 4 in the standard Lancers repertoire, and the Royal Lancers requires the longer music.

Stanford Historical Dance Week (June 21-25, 2010)

I'll be traveling out to California very soon for next week's Stanford Historical Dance Week.  I'm attending primarily as a student, though I'll be giving seminars on Tuesday and Friday afternoon on, respectively the Regency ballroom scene (dance developments and the feuds of rival London dancing masters Wilson and Chivers) and some of the choreographic connections between dances as far removed as Caroso's 16th-century balli, an 1830s German polonaise, and the Virginia Reel.

I'm really delighted with the mix of dances at this week.  The tracks include Renaissance dance, Baroque dance, historical ballet, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century social dance, with plenty of flexibility for people who want to mix and match.  I will be taking a mix of Renaissance dance and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century material, though I haven't decided exactly how to divide my time.  I'm probably a little unusual in that my strongest current interests are in the very earliest and very latest material, and the schedule leaves me some difficult choices.

As part of the trip, I'll also be at Stanford Dance Weekend for the preceding weekend and possibly parts of Stanford Waltz Weekend the following, along with calling for the Bay Area Country Dance Society on Saturday, June 26th.

As always, I'd be delighted to meet any Kickery readers; find me and say hello!

A Promiscuous Figure: The Sociable

"This is a very lively figure, as it keeps all the couples occupied and introduces a continual change of partners." 

    -- Dick's Quadrille Call-Book and Ball-Room Prompter, New York, 1878.

I've posted occasionally about promiscuous figures (Basket and Star, Gavotte and Minuet, Flirtation), single quadrille figures which may be substituted for one of the figures of the first set of quadrilles to provide more variety.  Another of these, which dates at least to 1848, was known variously as "The Sociable," "Quadrille Sociable," or "Social Quadrille."  Its distinctive feature was repeated partner changes.  As noted above, it also had the virtue of having very little waiting out for any of the couples.  While Charles Durang, writing in Philadelphia in 1856, sniffed at it as one of the "good, but now unfashionable" old figures, it seems to have remained popular right through the middle of the nineteenth century and is even included in a few manuals appearing into the late 19th and very early 20th century.

Different dancing masters disagreed about which figure of the first set this or other promiscuous figures may be substituted for.  One 1878 manual stated that substitution is done for the second or fifth figure, while an 1889 one is equally clear that the third and fourth figures are the ones to replace.  My personal opinion is that the Sociable is stylistically most like a fifth figure.

Thomas Hillgrove, writing in 1857, seems to have been the first to build an entire quadrille around the Sociable, using it as figure one in a traditional five-figure set called the "Quadrille Sociable."  Six years later, he includes it in a later manual as "Social Quadrille No. 1."  A similar five-figure quadrille is included in a manual attributed to Elias Howe and published in 1862.  Unfortunately, the five-figure version is not particularly interesting, just one of many interchangeable rearrangements of generic quadrille figures.  This may explain why it doesn't seem to have been picked up by many other authors. 

The Sociable by itself, however, is a fun little figure, easy to teach and fun to do.  Here's the basic version:

1930s Waltz Variations: The Waltz Balance Step

Moving right along with my series of short descriptions of 1930s waltz variations, here's an easy one that appeared in the first (1930) edition of Lillian Ray's Modern Ballroom Dancing, reappearing in the next five editions (through 1935) and then vanishing from the revamped seventh edition (1936).  Other posts in this series may be found in the 1930s category archive.  See the first 1930s waltz post for a brief description of the basic waltz of this era.

The Waltz Balance Step is essentially a series of four quarter-turns counter-clockwise which bring a couple around 360 degrees over four bars.  This leaves the dancers making a little four-bar eddy in their travel, actually stepping against line of dance on the second bar, so it should be done carefully on the actual dance floor -- either moving a bit towards the center and out of the "fast lane" before performing it or at least checking carefully for traffic immediately behind.

Rather than performing a box step (step-side-close) sequence on each bar and quarter-turn, however, the Waltz Balance Step is a series of "step-point..." sequences, making the turn on the first beat and then pointing the free foot, without weight, in the direction stepped on the second and third beats.