Capering & Kickery

June 2013 Gig Calendar

I'm going to spend large parts of June on fellowship-related research work, so my public gig schedule is very light this month.  The schedule as it currently stands now is below.  DJ gigs appear on my schedule somewhat randomly, so check back for those!

Saturday, June 1st ~ Concord, Massachusetts
Laendler from The Sound of Music Workshop (Facebook event page)
2:00-6:00  Workshop followed by DJ'ed waltz time

Sunday, June 9th ~ New York City
Regency Dance Workshop (Facebook event page)
Beginner-friendly lesson 3:00-5:00pm

Tuesday, June 11th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Jane Austen Era Dancing (Facebook event page)
Beginner-friendly lesson 8:15-9:30pm.  No costume needed.

Saturday, June 15th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Private event.

Sunday, June 16th ~ New Haven, Connecticut
Swing & Blues Practicum for Yale Swing & Blues (Facebook group)
8:00-11:00pm  DJing blues from 9:30-11:00.

Tuesday, June 25th ~ Cambridge, Massachusetts (Boston area)
Bluesy Tuesy  (Facebook event)
7:30-11:00pm.  DJing from 9:45-11:00.

Thursday, June 27th ~ Somerville, Massachusetts (Boston area)
Blues Union (Facebook event)
7:30pm-12:00 midnight.  DJing very briefly from 9:00-9:30.

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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.

Boston area: June 1-2, 25-30
New York City: June 8-9
Hartford, Connecticut: June 4-7, 11-14
New Haven & Middletown, Connecticut: June 16-20

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CD Review: The Pride & Prejudice Collection Volume III

After their first and second Pride and Prejudice Collections, I knew just what to expect from the Pemberley Players' Pride and Prejudice Collection Volume III: a very beautifully performed set of dance tunes, of which many are considerably out of date for Jane Austen's lifetime, let alone her novels, and of which none of the reasonably period tunes are played in a useful repeat pattern.  I was actually wrong about one thing: two of the tunes are played in a historical repeat pattern!  What luck!

Otherwise, this CD is about what I expected: eighteen tunes, of which eleven are way too early for a Austen-oriented collection.  Despite the name, these CDs are really mixes of tunes covering a century and a half or so, mostly before the Austen era.  The Pemberley Players are superb musicians and extremely nice people who let me use some of their tunes in our stage production of Pride and Prejudice back in April, but I do wish they would make an all-Austen-era recording rather than a modern English country dance mix.

Revisiting Swing and Turn Corners

When I discussed the Regency-era figures "Swing Corners" and "Turn Corners" a few years ago, I touched briefly on an earlier source, Nicholas Dukes' A concise & easy method of learning the figuring part of country dances (London, 1752) that contained an earlier version of "Turn Corners" which used single hands (right, left, right, left) rather than two hands for the turns but had a different pattern than the Regency version of "Swing Corners".

For the sake of completeness, I need to add one more version to my little timeline. 

Another dance for Miss McLeod's

Way back in the first year of Kickery, I wrote about the mid-nineteenth-century American contra dance "Light Dragoon", which Elias Howe assigned to the popular tune "Miss [or Mrs.] McLeod's Reel".  Here's another example of a country dance for the tune, this one taken from London dancing master Rudolph Radestock's The Royal Ball-Room Guide and Etiquette of the Drawing-Room (London, c1877).  Country dancing was not a major part of the fashionable London ballroom by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, though a few traditional dances like Sir Roger de Coverley and the Triumph appear to have lingered.  Radestock's book is unusual in giving not only six specific dances, including a polka country dance and a galopade, but another fifteen "various" country dances with no tune or other name attached and with very generic figures distinguished only by the frequent use of a poussette as the final figure.  "Miss M'Leod" [sic] is one of Radestock's half-dozen specific dances.