Capering & Kickery

Fixing Fandango

There's a popular dance in the modern English country dance community which I often cite as a dance that has a Regency "feel" to it, albeit with some quibbles about the details.  That doesn't make it a Regency-era dance (it's decades too early), but it's an earlier version of the same style popular in the Regency and uses some figures that remained popular into the first quarter of the nineteenth century.  That makes it a reasonable dance to use for a Regency/Jane Austen event in the absence of dancers and/or a caller who can handle dancing in actual period style.  But it doesn't make the modern dance a good historical reconstruction even for its own era (leaving aside how close that is or isn't to the Regency era) without some major fixing up.

Swing Corners vs. Turn Corners

Two figures that turn up frequently at the end of country dances in the Regency era are "Swing Corners" and "Turn Corners".  The two are not interchangeable; in the early nineteenth century, "swing" meant to turn by one hand and "turn" meant to turn by two hands.  That's not the only difference between the figures, however.

Dance Card: 1906

Here's another interesting dance card which, combined with the 1894 one I posted back in August, perfectly illustrates the final collapse in popularity of most of the nineteenth-century dances by first decade of the twentieth century.  While the waltz survives and the recently popular two-step holds its own...that's it.  The entire Order of Dances on the card consists of alternating waltzes and two-steps.  Click the image to see the list more closely.  There is provision for four unspecified extra dances at the end, but otherwise it's a monotonous alternation of those two dances. 

You can see why the Turkey Trot and then the one-step were considered a welcome change of pace!

The card was printed by "Jaccard" in Kansas City, Missouri, and appears to be from a fraternity or sorority ball, judging from the Greek letters in the small red logo on the front cover (again, click to enlarge).  It is helpfully dated 1906 in a large monogram above.  The white cord for the pencil survives, though the pencil itself is long gone.

While modern custom attaches the cord through a hole punched in an upper corner, this one has the cord knotted around the fold.

Edited 10/19/10 to add:

Karen Ann in the comments writes:

Phi Lambda Epsilon was founded February 12, 1892 at Clinton Academy, Missouri. There are currently seven extant chapters. It is described as a "national educational fraternity."

 

Ladies' Double Chain vs. Ladies' Grand Chain

Sometimes, musicians and prompters for Quadrille dancing, when they intend "Double Ladies' Chain," say "Ladies Grand Chain." This is wrong: the figures are entirely dissimilar.
        --- William B. De Garmo, The prompter (New York, 1865)

A century later, this problem is still with us, as modern-day dance historians confuse the two figures when reconstructing quadrilles.  The problem is made worse by the plethora of terminology.  Though the first of the two is called either a Ladies' Chain Double or a Ladies' Double Chain, the second can be known variously as the Chain of Four Ladies, Les Chaine des Dames Continue, Ladies' Grand Chain, Ladies' Right and Left Around, or Ladies' Grand Right and Left. 

Let's take a look at the difference between the two figures.

Eighth Annual Regency Assembly (October 16-17, New Haven, CT)

It's almost time!  Coming up this weekend, Saturday-Sunday, October 16-17 in New Haven, Connecticut, is my eighth annual Regency Assembly, an opportunity to try the kind of dances discussed in my posts on the dancing of Jane Austen's era and the Regency era in the context of a formal evening ball.

Saturday's events include a dance workshop followed by a formal evening ball with live music by Spare Parts, as heard in the film Bright Star and on The Regency Ballroom CD.

Sunday, stroll in the park before retiring to the parlor for tea and Regency gaming, including card games such as picquet and whist as well as board games, dominos, and spillikins.

Full details and registration information is available at the event website.  Here's a little secret for you: register online by Friday at 5pm and you can still take the advance rate!

The Newport

A new waltz or redowa variation pops up in a few of the manuals of the very late nineteenth century.  Presumably named after the wealthy resort town, the Newport appears in slightly different versions in different manuals, but the common element appears to be a series of quick sliding steps.

A Waltz Minuet

In the late nineteenth century, short dance sequences came into vogue, combining couple dancing with simple figures.  Among these were more than one attempt to merge a romanticized version of the eighteenth-century minuet with the waltz.  These "waltz minuets" bore no particular resemblance to their minuet namesakes, lacking the "Z" pattern of the true minuet or any real attempt at proper steps. 

In 1890, M.B. Gilbert published in his Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) a waltz minuet choreography consisting of a sixteen-bar "minuet" pattern alternating with sixteen bars of waltz.  The sequence is given below.  The first section is quite slow, with only one step or movement per bar of music.  The dancers start with right hands joined and both begin with the right foot.

1b    Slide right foot foward
1b    Close left foot to third position behind, bending the knees
1b    Slide left foot backward
1b    Close right foot to left in third position, bending the knees
2b    Walk around each other two steps (right, left)
2b    Bring feet together, drop hands, and bow/courtesy to partner over both measures
8b    Repeat all of the above joining left hands and beginning with the left foot
16b  Take closed position and waltz

Total: 32 bars of waltz music; repeat dance as needed to fill out music.

The first four bars are noted by Gilbert as being the "Pas minuet," though no baroque dancer would so label them.  The bringing of the feet together is not clearly spelled out, but it would make sense to simply close up the right foot to the left.  The waltz would be that described by Gilbert, the lively turning "leap-slide-cut" of the late nineteenth century.

A lovely little video of dancers Thomas Baird and Cheryl Stafford performing Elizabeth Aldrich's reconstruction of this waltz minuet may be viewed courtesy of the Library of Congress here.