Capering & Kickery

February 2013 Gig Calendar

I'm staying warm this winter with lots of travel and dance, including our first Connecticut Regency tea dance and DJ gigs in three cities!  I'm still adding gigs, but here's the February schedule so far:

Edited to add: note that my February 10th & 12th Regency events in Connecticut have been moved to February 17th & 26th, respectively, due to the enormous snowstorm of February 8-9th.

Friday, February 1st ~ New York City
Friday Night Blues
7:00pm-2:00am.  DJing blues 10:00-11:30pm, 12:30-2:00am.

Sunday, February 3rd ~ New York City
Regency Dance Workshop
Beginner-friendly lesson 3:00-5:00pm

Sunday, February 10th ~ New Haven, Connecticut
Swing & Blues Practicum for Yale Swing & Blues (Facebook group)
8:00-11:00pm  DJing both swing (8:00-9:30) and blues (9:30-11:00)!

Sunday, February 17th (rescheduled from February 10th) ~ Middletown, Connecticut
A Regency Tea Dance (Facebook event page)
2:00-5:00pm.  Costumes encouraged!

Tuesday, February 19th ~ Cambridge, Massachusetts (Boston area)
Bluesy Tuesy
7:30-11:00pm.  DJing blues from 9:45-11:00.

Saturday, February 23rd ~ Cambridge, Massachusetts (Boston area)
Winter Waltz Party (Facebook event page)
7:00-10:30pm.  Beginner lesson 7-8, DJ'ed waltz and other dancing 8-10:30.

Sunday, February 24th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Nineteenth-Century Waltz Workshop (scroll down the page)
Beginner-friendly lesson 3:00-5:00pm.

Sunday, February 24th ~ New Haven, Connecticut
Swing & Blues Practicum for Yale Swing & Blues (Facebook group)
8:00-11:00pm  DJing both swing (8:00-9:30) and blues (9:30-11:00)!

Tuesday, February 26th (rescheduled from February 12th) ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Jane Austen Era Dancing
Beginner-friendly lesson 8:15-9:30pm.  No costume needed.

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I am available for private lessons in Connecticut or on my various travels; during the latter, you must provide the dance space.  Email me directly if you would like to schedule a private lesson.

New York: February 1-3
New Haven & Middletown, Connecticut: February 4-18, 25-28
Boston: February 19-23

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Coming in March:
Regency & Civil War era dancing in Connecticut and New York!

Late Victorian Waltz Variations: Harvard Dip

I've been spending some quality time in Harvard's library lately, which reminded me of this little waltz variation by Melvin Ballou Gilbert, author of Round Dancing.  The original instructions may be seen at left; click the image to enlarge.

The Harvard Dip was published in Gilbert's magazine of dance, etiquette, and exercise, The Director, in September, 1898.  I have never seen it published elsewhere, and suspect it was purely a dancing-school variation.  The name appears to be a commercial gimmick; there is no obvious connection to Harvard other than perhaps Gilbert's desire to attract that university's students to his summer dance classes in Boston.

Gilbert earns no credit for originality with the Harvard Dip.  The first half of the eight-bar sequence exactly mimics his Brooklyn colleague H. Fletcher Rivers' "Le Metropole", with four bars of alternating slides sideways along the line of dance and half-turns of waltz.  The second part consists of the second, third, and fourth bars of Indianapolis dancing master D. R. Brenneke's "Fascination" plus a bar of waltz at the end to round out the musical phrase and set up the opposite-foot repeat.  Both "Le Metropole" and "Fascination" were included in Round Dancing.

This reshuffling of the same basic elements of late nineteenth-century American waltz variations makes the Harvard Dip a shining example of the desperate flailing of dancing masters attempting to generate new material in the face of the decline in interest in most of the old nineteenth century dance repertoire.  That does not make it any worse (or better) than many other variations of this era, so should you wish to dance it, here's how to do it:

Mr. Scott's Two-Step

The two-step of the 1890s and early 1900s was so simple to dance, and so aggressively condemned by many dancing masters, that it's actually fairly unusual to find a good description of it in a dance manual, though minor variations and sequences of dubious originality and debatable utility abound.  English dancing master Edward Scott, in How to dance and guide to the ball-room (London, c1902), provides a rare overview of the basic dance as performed in Edwardian England.

Steps and timing
Scott specifies that the music for the two-step should be in 6/8, and explains that it is "practically our old friend the galop performed with figures, in regulated sequences, and to a different rhythm," though Americans, he claims, apply the name two-step to "any dance founded on the chassé movement, or that in which one foot appears to be chasing the other."

The basic movement of the two-step is a simple slide-close-slide done in 6/8 time.  Scott describes it in detail:

The gentleman slides his left foot forward, his weight thrown thereon, and rests for two counts.  At the third count he brings his right toe lightly up to the heel of the left, and at the fourth count immediately slides his left foot again forward, stopping on it for the second three counts of the bar.  For the next bar he slides his right foot forward, sustaining his balance, while the left toe is brought lightly to the right heel, and the right again slid forward to rest and carry the weight for the next half bar.

The rhythm will be somewhat as if you said “right and right, left and left, etc., the and corresponding to the quick chasing step made with the toe of the opposite foot.

Scott calls this the chassé à trois pas or simply the "chassé movement".  The rhythm is typical of jig-time dances and can be charted thus:

        *     *  *          *     *  *                   
        1-&-a-2-&-a  1-&-a-2-&-a

It's generally unnecessary to break down the exact timing of each step in detail; dancers with any ear for rhythm will pick it up instinctively from the accenting of the music.

Book Review: A Dance Through Time

I received a copy of Jeremy Barlow's A Dance Through Time: Images of Western Social Dancing from the Middle Ages to Modern Times (Bodleian Library, 2012) as a Christmas gift from a friend.  I know (of) Barlow primarily through his excellent recordings of sixteenth and seventeenth century dance music as the leader of the Broadside Band.  I've read only a few of his many articles and books, but I trust his scholarship and consider my copy of his edited edition of the music from the eighteen editions of Volume I of Playford's The Dancing Master, The Complete Country Dance Tunes from Playford's Dancing Master, 1651-c.1728, invaluable for working with Playford-published country dances. 

A Dance Through Time combines Barlow's interest in dance and music imagery with the collection of Oxford's Bodleian Library and Ashmolean Museum, with stunning results: a sturdily-bound trade paperback printed on heavy, glossy paper containing forty-nine full-color images of dance ranging from illuminatons from the margins of medieval manuscripts to photographs of twentieth-century ballroom dancers.  A number of them are completely new to me.  Barlow offers commentary throughout on the depiction of dance and points out intriguing similarities across the centuries in the representation of varying styles of dance and the social class of the participants. 

Unsurprisingly, given Barlow's expertise in early music, the book is much stronger on illustrations of medieval and Renaissance dance than on eighteenth and nineteenth century dance, but that makes it all the more useful -- I have far fewer images from the earlier eras.

The commentary is aimed at a general audience and, as it covers at least eight centuries of dance, necessarily only an overview of the topic, but I found it useful and interesting.  I do think Barlow occasionally goes a bit too far in regarding images as depicting a particular dance rather than being symbolic illustrations of dance in general, but he is clear enough about when he is speculating.

The one complaint I have with the presentation of the images is that some of the larger ones are printed across two facing pages, meaning that the centers of the images are partly lost by the way the pages are bound.  I would have happily settled for smaller reproductions that I could see all of.  Happily, his index of illustrations includes the locations of the originals, so tracking them down would be easy enough.  And the index offers intriguing hints of the riches the Bodleian has to offer.

I highly recommend A Dance Through Time both for dance researchers and for anyone who enjoys historical dance. 

Shop for yourself:

 

January 2013 Gig Calendar

Happy new year!  I'm back on the road again in New York, Connecticut, and Boston this month after my holiday break:

Sunday, January 6th ~ New York City
Regency Dance Workshop (Facebook event page)
Beginner-friendly lesson 3:00-5:00pm

Monday, January 7th ~ Bound Brook, New Jersey
7:00-10:00pm.  Couple dances & mixers for a folk dance group; semi-private event.  Contact Loretta Holz if interested in attending.

Tuesday, January 8th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Jane Austen Era Dancing (Facebook event page)
Beginner-friendly lesson 8:15-9:30pm.  No costume needed.

Sunday, January 13th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Slow Waltz for Beginners (scroll down the page)
Beginner-friendly lesson 3:00-5:00pm.

Sunday, January 13th ~ New Haven, Connecticut
Swing & Blues Practicum for Yale Swing & Blues (Facebook group)
8:00-11:00pm  DJing the blues segment from 9:30-11:00.

Tuesday, January 15th ~ Cambridge, Massachusetts (Boston area)
Bluesy Tuesy
7:30-11:00  DJing blues from 9:45-11:00.

Saturday, January 19th ~ Cambridge, Massachusetts (Boston area)
Private event

Tuesday, January 22nd ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Civil War Era Dancing (scroll down page) (Facebook event page)
Beginner-friendly lesson 8:15-9:30pm.  No costume needed.

Saturday, January 26th ~ New York City
Fusion Waltz Workshop: Cross-Step/Box-Step (Facebook event page)
4:00-6:00pm Beginner-friendly lesson

Tuesday, January 29th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Civil War Era Dancing (scroll down page) (Facebook event page)
Beginner-friendly lesson 8:15-9:30pm.  No costume needed.

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I am available for private lessons in Connecticut or on my various travels; during the latter, you must provide the dance space.  Email me directly if you would like to schedule a private lesson.

New York: January 6-7, 25-27
New Haven & Middletown, Connecticut: January 8-14, 22-24, 28-31
Boston: January 15-21

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Coming in February:
Connecticut's first Regency Tea Dance, blues DJing in New York and Boston, and another Boston waltz party!