Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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Month: July 2014

  • August 2014 Gig Calendar

    August is vacation month, for my personal definition of vacation that involves a lot of time spent in libraries and talking about dance history and otherwise geeking out.  This is differs from my normal routine of a lot of time spent in libraries and talking about dance history in that the libraries are located and the conversations and geeking out will occur in exciting foreign countries.

    The beginning of the month will have only my routine monthly workshops.  At the end of the month, I have scheduled five days of jet-lagged stupor.  Details of the former:

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  • The Five Step York

    The Five Step York, created by Indianapolis dancing master D. B. Brenneke, is yet another of the myriad variations for the York, one of the more durable and popular redowa/mazurka waltz variations of the late nineteenth century.  It builds directly on Brenneke’s own New York sequence.  While it is not a regular part of my “York set”, the Five Step York is an easy little variation to add to one’s York repertoire.

    I am aware of only two published descriptions of the Five Step York: in English, in M. B. Gilbert’s Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890), and in French, in [George] Washington Lopp’s La Danse (Paris, 1903), where it is listed as “Le York à 5 Pas”.  Gilbert puts it under redowa/mazurka variations, and Lopp lists it as a mazurka.  Much of Lopp is simply a translation of Gilbert, but he differs just enough to add either clarity or confusion to some of the descriptions.  In this case, I believe that both Gilbert and Lopp have flaws in their descriptions, but I can make two reasonable guesses as to what the actual sequence should be.

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  • Hop, hop, foxtrotters!

    Concluding my extended celebration of the foxtrot‘s centennial year: more about the hop-turn!

    A few years ago, I considered hopping in the 1910s foxtrot to be a relatively obscure practice — I’d only ever found one sequence with a hop in it and had only a brief mention in a newspaper article to reassure me that it was not just a one-couple oddity.  But looking through Edna Stuart Lee’s Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916), there are actually several sequences that include hops, including two that are strikingly similar to the previously described Bassett/Elliott hop-turn.

    Here are two more ways to, in the words of the newspaper article, “make our turn with a quick, fast hop” while foxtrotting.

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  • Thinking in Fives

    I spent a lot of time thinking about quintuple-meter (5/4 or 5/8 time) dances earlier this year, though not much of it showed up on Kickery at the time.  Since historical dance description and terminology are not standardized, there’s an important distinction to keep in mind for all dances with some association with the number five:

    Five steps (or movements) in a dance do not necessarily imply 5/4 or 5/8 time.

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  • On the Exclusive in Dancing, 1834

    The English and French seem never to have been shy about taking sly little pokes at each other.  In 1834 a New York newspaper reprinted from an unnamed London paper an article, “On the Exclusive in Dancing”, which took aim at French ballroom etiquette.  Apparently the French were questioning the propriety of the country dance:

    [The French] appear to be growing fastidious in their amusements, and have learned to be English enough to question certain minor points of propriety and etiquette in their public balls; as, for instance, whether it be proper for a gentleman to resign the hand of his partner to contact with strangers for the mere preservation of a figure in a country dance, 

    and had in fact discarded country dances completely, in favor of

    some more conjugal kind of movement, either waltzes, mazurkas, or galopes, that rivet a couple together for a whole evening till (we would fain hope) they were sick of one another and themselves.

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Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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