(Eighth in a series of posts discussing and analyzing the Swedish dances. The first post may be found here.)
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Swedish dances reappear in a series of American dancing manuals...with a bit of a twist.
In chronological order, essentially identical instructions are found in:
Hillgrove, Thomas. The scholars' companion and ball-room vade mecum. New York, 1857.
Howe, Elias. American dancing master, and ball-room prompter. Boston, 1862.
Hillgrove, Thomas. A complete practical guide to the art of dancing. New York, 1863.
Howe, Elias. Howe's new American dancing master. Boston, 1882.
Koncen, Mathias J. Prof. M. J. Koncen's quadrille call book and ball room guide. St. Louis, 1883.
Three simple figures, numbered 1-3, are given by both Hillgrove and Howe. The reconstruction is very straightforward:
1.
8b All forward and back twice (trios holding hands)
8b Each gentleman balance with their right opposite diagonal lady and turn two hands
8b Each gentleman balance with their left opposite diagonal lady and turn two hands
8b All forward and back, forward and pass through
2.
8b All forward and back twice
8b Top gentleman and bottom ladies hands three round and back
8b Bottom gentleman and top ladies same
8b All forward and back, forward and pass through
3.
8b All forward and back twice
8b Four ladies cross right hands round, left hands back
8b Hands six all halfway round and back
8b All forward and back, forward and pass through
Performance notes (but see next subheading!)
"Top" and "bottom" refer to the trio closer to the head of the set or foot of the set, respectively.
Adopting Chivers' version of "forward and pass through" that adds setting (described in part two of this series) wil prevent lines from getting so close together as to make the forward-and-back of the next repeat awkward. Pass through (2b) then join hands and set right and left (2b).
Howe and Koncen default to a gentleman and two ladies in their diagrams. Hillgrove notes that trios of a lady and two gentlemen are also acceptable.
These are not the Swedish dances they look like
Now, here's the twist: Hillgrove and Howe both crammed all three figures together into a single three-part dance with the horrifying note that they are "All repeated in succession." That makes them not three entirely typical little Swedish dances but a single, 96-bar figure called, simply "Swedish Dance".
And just in case "in succession" was not perfectly clear, Koncen eliminated the figure numbers entirely and gave all the above figures (with one change, swapping the second and third figures of #2) as one long continuous list.
The mid-century American "Swedish Dance" was not a dance genre, or even a single-survivor dance like the Spanish Dance, but one giant choreographic mashup.
And it is not an improvement.
For skilled dancers, the figures are monotonous; fully half of the dance consists of sixteen-bar sequences of forward/back, forward/pass through, forward/back, forward/back. Nor is it ideal for beginners, who might be expected to have a lower boredom threshold. While the three separate parts are simple enough, when combined into one dance their very repetitiveness makes them a memory challenge. A good caller can overcome this, and I've seen the American Swedish Dance called successfully by the late Patri Pugliese with a mixed-level group of dancers, but I don't find much occasion to use it at balls myself.
How did this happen?
One can't make a definite determination without a confession, but I think the evidence points to Thomas Hillgrove as the originator of the mashup. The chronology of sources for this Swedish Dance does imply it, but even more suggestive to me is the likely plagiarism involved. The three figures above are very, very similar to those found in Pollock's manual, described in the previous post in this series. Figure two is identical to Pollock's #2 except for the order of the middle two figure. The first part is very similar to Pollock's #3, and the third to Pollock's #1. This seems a bit much for coincidence.
Koncen, Howe, and Hillgrove were all rather notorious plagiarists who "borrowed" heavily from other books, and two of the three likely copied from the other one. Koncen's manual is much later than the other two, so I think he is less likely to be originator of this mess.
Howe and Hillgrove both definitely had access to English manuals from which they copied material. But Howe, when he plagiarizes, more often takes material word-for-word, or very close to; his "The Ball-Room" section in the 1862 manual linked above is taken directly from a book by Mrs. Nicholas Henderson, whom he politely credits, with only one or two words changed. Howe also does not include any introduction to the dance.
Hillgrove, on the other hand, is likely to borrow a few sentences and then put his own spin on things. And his introduction is rather incriminating. Compare the introduction to the Swedish dances from Pollock's manual of the 1830s with Hillgrove's:
This dance will be found particularly useful, where there happens to be a large majority of either ladies of gentlemen. The party being placed as above, in lines of three, a gent. and two ladies, or a lady and two gents. the dance proceeds in the same way as the Mescolanzes, except that no change of places is to be made either at the top or bottom of the set. (Pollock)
This dance will be found particularly useful in parties where there happens to be a large majority of either ladies or gentlemen. The party, being placed as above in lines of three, a gentleman and two ladies, or a lady and two gentlemen, as vis-a-vis, and the dance proceeds with as many sets as can be formed from the company, each three facing three, and formed in the same manner as our Spanish Dance, and is commenced by all the dancers at the same time, and finished at the pleasure of the party, or on the authority of the director of ceremonies. (Hillgrove)
It is wildly unlikely that the close similarity of the first two sentences is a coincidence.
I believe that Hillgrove borrowed the dance figures from Pollock and tweaked them slightly, not understanding that Pollock's numbering (something I've never seen in an American manual) meant that they were three separate dances, not three parts of one dance. He then copied part of the introduction, explaining the progression in terms familiar to him. That's entirely typical of Hillgrove.
It's not impossible that some unknown earlier writer was the actual plagiarist, and Hillgrove merely copied from him, but in the absence of some intervening source, I think Hillgrove is the most likely culprit. And thus in mid-nineteenth-century America, dancers were stuck with a single, bizarrely lengthy Swedish Dance rather than a whole genre of them.
And it lasted
This Swedish Dance made it into contra dance history books in the twentieth century, notably Beth Tolman and Ralph Page's The Country Dance Book (New York, 1937), where it acquired some colorful but bogus history:
Swedish immigrants are responsible for the introduction of the following number...Well we remember the Big Swede in our town (he had a name but nobody ever called him by it) as he used to stride out to dance with two dames. A grin cut his face in two and his blonde head sat perfectly erect on his huge body, as if he were entertaining an imaginary carbuncle on the back of his neck.
And from the instructions:
All these figures are now repeated, and so on until the prompter ends the dance or some poor hapless man, not quite so Swedish in stamina, faints of exhaustion.
Rickey Holden repeats the supposed Swedish origin, quoting Tolman and Page, in The Contra Dance Book (Newark, 1956). I've never seen it danced in a modern contra context, and given the tastes of modern dancers, I would be very surprised if it were still in the repertoire anywhere.
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