- Era: 1860s, America (New England)
The Gothic Dance seems at first glance to be an oddity among mid-century dances, appearing in only one manual that I have ever found, and unusual in format within the lengthy collection of contra dances in Elias Howe’s American Dancing Master and Ball-Room Prompter (Boston, 1862). The dance was first reconstructed by my late mentor and friend, Patri Pugliese, whose reconstruction appears online in the companion dance notes to the CD The Civil War Ballroom. The dance is a particularly easy one, energetic and fun for beginners and experienced dancers alike, and thus a good choice for balls with a large percentage of new dancers.
Form two lines down the room, the ladies on the right and gentlemen on the left.
No. 1. Ladies advance two bars. Gentlemen then advance while ladies retire: gentlemen stop and hold up both their hands, while ladies pass under them to the other side. Repeat the whole to places.
No. 2. Two ladies and two gentlemen hands four round; gentlemen stop across the room and hold up their hands while the ladies pass under and twice round their partners; first and second couple galop down to the bottom and stop. Repeat the whole until into place.
My reconstruction agrees in its major elements with Patri’s version:
(begin with gentlemen in one line, ladies in the other, facing partners, taking hands along lines)
2b Ladies advance toward partners
2b Gentlemen advance while ladies retire
2b Gentlemen hold hands up, forming arches; ladies pass under (right shoulders with partners)
2b All turn over their right shoulder to form facing lines again
8b Repeat all this to places
8b* Top two couples circle left three-quarters round, leaving gentlemen facing up the set and holding hands up in an arch; ladies pass under the arch and around their partners twice (see note below)
8b* Top two couples galop to bottom of the set and separate into lines (see note below)
(the dance repeats until all couples have returned to original places)
* The timing on these two figures is somewhat flexible; see note below.
Reconstruction/performance notes
The original lines are standard country/contra dance lines, with the top of the room (usually, the location of the band) to the gentlemen’s left and ladies’ right. For practical reasons, the sets should not be too long, since the couples must be able to galop all the way down the set in no more than eight bars of music. For an easy perfect ending with all couples in original places, there must either be an even number of couples, though I don't regard that as particularly critical -- the dance is such fun that dancers will not generally object to going through it twice as many times as strictly called for.
Other than that final galop, dancers of this era would probably have used a sinple walking step throughout, with the advance and retire figures being three steps and a close of the feet in each direction, though the general liveliness of the dance suggests to me that it would not be completely unthinkable to instead use a simple chassé (in modern terms, a "skip-change") step throughout.
There are three notable ambiguities in the dance:
(1) how the ladies pass under the arms in the first figure so as to prevent two ladies from attempting to both pass under the same “arch” -- impossible in the hooped skirts of the era!
(2) the timing of the circling and ladies going round their partners
(3) the method of the galop to the bottom
Since the instructions provide no specific assistance, all of these are informed but ultimately personal aesthetic decisions on the part of the reconstructor or teacher. My preferred solutions:
For the passing under the arms, this is a simple choice of sides, with my decision (and Patri’s) both going to having the ladies pass what would be right shoulders with their partners, as in the cross-over figures in quadrilles where the dancers pass right shoulders. This is less visually obvious when the gentlemen have their arms in the air; if “pass right shoulders” is confusing the dancers, try having each lady look diagonally to her left and go under the arch there.
Presumably the "arches" of the men's arms are the reason for the name of the dance -- a play on the Gothic arches that were a feature of medieval architecture.
The timing of the circling and the method of the galop I will consider as a pair because the latter affects the former. Circling three-quarters round ought to take about three bars of music (six steps), depending on the speed of the dancers. The ladies have a difficult challenge to go completely around their partners twice, both in the tight timing and in ending up in an appropriate position for the galop down the set. Ideally, this would finish within the same eight bars; in practice, it sometimes spills over into the next eight bars, shortening the time available for the galop down the set.
For the galop, there are several options:
The dancers might galop down in a the standard ballroom position of the era, with the man’s right arm around the lady, his left hand and her right joined in front. This means the dancers must either galop “over elbows”, keeping the man’s right side and the woman’s left toward the bottom of the dance as they go, or galop with joined hands in front, meaning they will have to make a half-turn at the bottom to get to the correct sides. The former is not particularly instinctive for most dancers, and the latter, along with being mentioned nowhere in the instructions, adds one more thing the dancers must accomplish in an already crowded sixteen bars of music.
An old-fashioned option would be to use a reverse hold, with the man’s left arm around the lady and his right and her left hand joined in front. This is one of the ways that dancers galoped in the early 1830s, as described in my discussion of a galop pattern from that era in which the ladies would be shifted from one side to the other and from a normal ballroom hold to a reverse hold. Since the Gothic Dance bears some resemblance to 1830s galopades -- indeed, to a dance from that same manual -- this makes a certain degree of sense, though it also suffers from not being anything that most dancers will do instinctively.
The other two options are to either take two hands or to take crossed hands (right in right, left in left) and galop sideways down the set. These avoid any struggles with muscle memory and also allow the dancers to separate easily at the end. Taking two hands is the old-fashioned way of leading down the middle from the late 18th and early 19th century, so it has some historical pedigree. Crossing hands and sliding sideways has a contemporary parallel in its use by mid-century dancing masters in the First Set of Quadrilles. Howe describes part of the first figure of the quadrille as “The first and second couples face their partners, joining hands with the right hand uppermost, and chassa [sic] across the set.”
All things considered, I would avoid taking a regular ballroom hold and galoping joined hands first, since that requires the extra half-turn at the end, but otherwise there is no definitive basis on which to choose between four of the five options: regular ballroom hold traveling “over elbows”, reverse ballroom hold, two hands, or crossed hands. The choice can vary by couple without affecting the other couples or the dance as a whole. My preference is for a two-hand or crossed-hand hold, as presenting the fewest difficulties for the dancers.
Having made that decision, let’s go back to the circling and how the dancers must end up positioned to make this work. The two key elements: the ladies should end up on the ladies’ side of the dance, and at the end of the galop the original second couple should end at the very bottom of the set, below the first couple, in order that when dance can end with all couples in original places. When the circling is complete and the gentlemen are making the arches, the four dancers start positioned as follows:
L1 L2
G1 G2
G3 L3
G4 L4
G5 L5
etc. etc.
They need to end, for the galop:
G1 L1 G2 L2
and couple number two needs to take the lead so as to most easily travel the furthest down the set and end at the bottom. Going literally twice around their partners actually leaves the second lady with a longer track. While it’s difficult to make this level of precision stick in the excitement of the dance, my suggestion would be that the first lady go twice around and then one quarter more, while the second lady go only once and three-quarters round, both ending as shown above, with the second lady having the shorter track (and thus presumably finishing first) so that she and her partner can lead the galop down the set and end at the very bottom, as required by the original instructions.
In practice, the traveling around the gentlemen and the galop tend to become a bit manic, with the ladies losing track of how many times they’ve gone round, one couple setting out too early, etc. Since part of the fun of the dance is in its energy level and the sheer silliness of two women in hoop skirts squeezing through between the gentlemen and circling them at fairly frantic speed, one shouldn’t get too obsessive about how it works out at an actual event. The dancers, one way or another, will recover.
I began this post by noting that the Gothic Dance was something of an oddity in its era, but that is something of an illusion. Most of its elements are minor variations on established dance traditions of the early nineteenth century. Whole-set dances have a long track record in English country dance, back to the short-set dances for three or four couples in John Playford’s The English Dancing Master (London, 1651), with the most obvious nineteenth-century prototypes being Sir Roger de Coverley (England) and its close cousin the Virginia Reel (America). Howe’s own Celebrated Opera Reel, found in the same manual, offers a similar pattern of two active couples at the top, with one couple progressing to the bottom after each iteration. More interestingly, London dancing master J.S. Pollock’s Companion to La Terpsichore Moderne (Second Edition), c1830, offers a “country dance gallopade” which has a remarkably similar overall pattern, though also with only a single couple progressing to the bottom. Going further back, a pair of “fancy dances” found in A Treatise on Dancing (Boston(?), 1807) by the anonymous "Saltator" show a similar pattern of facing lines changing sides and back, and one of them features a “chasse [sic] to the bottom” progression.
The idea of a galopade country dance has survived all the way into modern times -- the dance Galopede, found in folk dance circles today, follows the familiar nineteenth-century pattern of lines advancing, retiring, crossing over, and repeating to places.
Music
There is no tune specified for the Gothic Dance, but any lively thirty-two-bar dance tune will work. On their CD, The Civil War Ballroom, the historically-informed dance band Spare Parts chooses a medley of three period dance tunes, “Go to the Devil and Shake Yourself”, “Gary Owen”, and “Larry O'Gaff”.
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