First off, let me note that the title of this post is not a comment on anyone's intellect. It's a riff on the titles of the popular series of "For Dummies" books, which are intended simply as accessible how-to guides for people who are not familiar with a topic. I have a couple of them myself. Neither I nor this post have any actual connection with these books, and no copyright infringement is intended.
It's been pointed out to me that negative critiques of historically ludicrous "Regency" ball programs, however justified, are not actually helpful for people who are not dance scholars and whose audience is not interested in serious study of historical dance, but who would like to do a decent job programming such a ball, or at least avoid making obvious idiots of themselves by calling seventeenth-century dances at a Regency- or Jane Austen-themed event.
That's a reasonable complaint. It's always easier to criticize than to be constructive. And most of Kickery delves too deeply into the details for a modern country dance caller who just wants to do their gig.
I'm not going to write a modern caller's guide to doing such balls (not as a blog post, anyway!) But I can at least give some basic help to people who don't have the time (or motivation) to go for higher levels of authenticity.
I went with "Jane Austen" in the title rather than "Regency" because I think the name recognition and audience are higher for the author than for the era and because the single easy-to-find reference I'm using has more dances drawn from sources published in Austen's lifetime than from the years of the actual Regency. But everything below would be acceptable, if not exactly the latest fashion, for country-dance-focused Regency balls as well.
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So, you're a caller of modern English country dancing, and some group has asked you to run a Jane Austen- or Regency-themed ball. You have no real idea what that means except that they want country dancing and maybe some pretty waltzes like they've seen in the movies. They're not going to hire someone like me who does know what that means, because they don't care that much (and there aren't a lot of people like me to hire, anyway). You're not going to spend lots of time delving into dance history, because neither you nor the dancers care that much, and they're probably paying you peanuts.
You're certainly not going to work out how a ball was actually done historically and spend the time to train the dancers to do it; no way. You want to do standard longways country dances, not square dances or circle dances or some weird version of the Virginia Reel. You just want to call the ball in your own familiar fashion without too much hassle or stress. But you do have some sense of history and maybe some ethical concerns about false advertising, so you'd like to make an effort to call dances that are reasonable for the era. Maybe you're even aware that movies don't make much (if any) attempt to be accurate in dance scenes, so you're not going to just use Hollywood as your reference. (Though using the BBC's Pride & Prejudice: Having a Ball is not a bad idea, since it's a notable exception to the generally dreadful portrayal of this era's dance on film!)
Or maybe it's just that you're going to publish your program online and would prefer that it not be immortalized on Kickery as a bad example. Fair enough.
Here's how to do it with a minimum of hassle.
First, if you don't already have one, go get yourself a copy of The Playford Ball, a book by Kate Van Winkle Keller and Genevieve Shimer which may be ordered from the Country Dance and Song Society (CDSS) store or Amazon. I'm using this book as a reference because it's popular and easy to find. Many callers will already have it on their bookshelf. Despite having "Playford" in the title, it actually includes dances from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century as well.
At the bottom of this post is a list of fourteen dances included in the The Playford Ball which are more-or-less from Jane Austen's lifetime (give or take a few years). While country dancing changed quite a bit across the two hundred or so recorded years of its popularity, the style was reasonably stable from around 1770 to 1825. So while the later dances might be a little odd in the context of a ball set in 1785 and the earlier ones might be a bit old-fashioned for 1815, they are not as outright ridiculous as dances from 1651 or 1706 or 1959 would be.
I could do an endless number of similar programs, probably better than this one, by running through the enormous catalog of dance reconstructions extant in the modern English country dance community today if I had the resources for it and cared to make the effort. But I don't have a collection of modern reconstructions, because I don't call modern balls, and I don't want to turn this into a different sort of project for callers by making them run all over the place looking for particular reconstructions. I'm keeping it simple.
Now, using this list, or making a similarly date-conscious list from your own collection, does not mean you're dancing like Jane Austen did. Dancers in her era would have used actual dance steps rather than walking through most of the dances. They wouldn't have had the same concept of a dance as a choreographed piece with a matched tune and an official name; figures and tunes were pretty interchangeable. A dance program wouldn't have existed; how could it, without names of dances? There wouldn't have been a professional caller; the ladies and their partners would have called the dances themselves. Only the top couple would have begun the dance, with everyone else starting to move only as the top couple worked their way down the set. Each dance would have lasted a lot longer, maybe as long as forty-five minutes with a long set, as each of the couples worked its way up and down and returned to their original places. There wouldn't have been three-couple sets with each couple dropping to the bottom after one iteration of the dance. And many of the modern reconstructions of these dances are a little, ah, dubious.
So you aren't going to be running a best-practices reenactment of a ball of Jane Austen's lifetime. That's not your goal. (Edited 7/11/13 to add: but if it is, I wrote a follow-up post talking about some important elements for period practice.)
But at least you'll have done the bare minimum of choosing a program of dances from Jane Austen's general era, and you will therefore receive no embarrassing public critique from me, because I do grasp that for most modern groups, that really is good enough.
The list of dances below is in alphabetical order Putting them into an interesting order is left as an exercise for you as the caller of the event. The music is in a variety of time signatures and keys. Three are waltzes. The list is a bit heavy on jigs and on three-couple sets, but jigs were popular and three-couple sets are one of the ways today's English country dancers adapt triple minor dances to suit modern tastes.
The references to sources are pulled from The Playford Ball, which gives the full citations and, wonderfully, facsimiles of the originals. In cases where a different tune has become attached to the figures -- a perfectly historical practice! -- I've given the citation for that as well. I'm not going to retype the whole bibliography, but if you're doing this without a copy of The Playford Ball handy because you have all these reconstructions already, most of the sources can be found listed in Robert Keller's Dance Figures Index: English Country Dances, 1651-1827.
If you have questions about anything I didn't cover above, leave them in the comments.
Good luck with your ball!
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Dances from The Playford Ball that are reasonable for a "Jane Austen ball"
Bath Carnival
(Thompson, 1777; music "Keppels Delight" from Thompson, 1780)
The Bishop
(Thompson, 1780; music "Miss Dolland's Delight" from Thompson, 1780)
The Corporation
(Thompson, 1777; music "Fete Champetre" from Thompson, 1780)
Dover Pier
(Preston, 1791)
The Dressed Ship
(Thompson, 1774)
The Duke of Kent's Waltz
(Cahusac, 1801)
The Fandango
(Thompson, 1774)
(I wrote about how this dance has been modified from the original figures here.)
The Installation
(Thompson, 1772)
Knole Park
(Voight, c1809; music from Bishop, 1788)
Miss Sayer's Allemand
(Budd, 1781)
The Northdown Waltz
(Goulding, 1820)
Once a Night
(Thompson, 1774; music from Thompson, 1788)
Prince William of Glo's'ter's Waltz
(Preston, 1801)
Ramsgate Assembly
(Budd, 1795)
The Touchstone
(Thompson, 1780)
A Trip to Tunbridge
(Preston, 1793)
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