Capering & Kickery

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:

Sunday, August 3rd ~ New York City
Regency Dance Workshop (Facebook event)
Beginner-friendly lesson 3:00-5:00pm.  No costume needed.

Tuesday, August 5th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Jane Austen Era Dancing (Facebook event)
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 (as well as a really substantial fee to get me to teach during my vacation).  Email me directly if you would like to schedule a private lesson.

New Haven & Middletown, Connecticut: August 1-6, 27-31

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Coming in September: I reenact my crazy April in a slightly different order with classes in NYC, Middletown, Chicago, Toronto, and Boston!

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.

CD Review: The Whistler and His Dog

All these posts about foxtrot the last few months have inspired me to dig around in my old CDs for some foxtrot music I haven't already used a hundred times.  The Whistler and His Dog: More Music from the Arthur Pryor Orchestra Collection is a very old CD (1989) from the wonderful Paragon Ragtime Orchestra, whose Knockout Drops I discussed several years ago.  As with Knockout Drops, it has plenty of very danceable music.  This is all the more amazing since I don't believe Paragon, which at the time of this recording was only a few years old, ever actually plays for dancers.

The pieces on this CD are taken from the sheet music collection of one of Scott Joplin's contemporaries, "legendary trombonist, conductor composer/arranger, Arthur Pryor (1870-1942)" and played using period orchestral arrangements when available.  Paragon notes on its website that this is the recording played by Disney on its "Main Street U.S.A." at Disneyland, Disney World, and Disneyland Paris.  It's a wonderful listening CD for anyone who likes ragtime music.

So what does it hold for dancers? 

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.

Bird Center Dance Cartoons, 1903-1904

The fictional Illinois town of Bird Center was created by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist John T. McCutcheon (1870-1949) in the early years of the twentieth century.  The cast of repeating characters, while humorously portrayed, was intended to depict the essential goodness of small-time life and small-town people, presumably as contrasted to the bustling metropolis of Chicago, where the cartoons appeared in the Chicago Record-Herald and Chicago Tribune.  The series was an enormous hit.  A collection of the cartoons to date, Bird Center Cartoons, was published in 1904.  In Chicago Portraits (2012), June Skinner Sawyers stated that at the time, "Many people held Bird Center parties where people would portray the various characters.  Even card games were created, each card an original drawing by McCutcheon himself...a theatrical adaptation of Bird Center was mounted at the Majestic Theatre in New York.  (It closed after a disappointing thirteen-week run.)"

In looking at the occasional depictions of dance in the Bird Center cartoons, one must keep in mind that though McCutcheon briefly lived on a farm as a child, by the time of these cartoons he was a sophisticated journalist who had traveled internationally to China, Japan, South Africa, and the Philippines.  McCutcheon was depicting his idealized vision of old-fashioned small-town life.  The cartoons probably say as much about his upbringing in Indiana in the 1870s as about anything happening in Chicago in the early 1900s.

Programming a Ball, 1896

The American periodical Harper's Bazaar was started in 1867 by the company Harper & Brothers as a weekly fashion magazine.  It is well-known to those interested in nineteenth-century costume for its beautiful, highly detailed fashion plates and still exists today as a glossy monthly magazine.

On February 22, 1896, Harper's Bazaar published a short article entitled "Fashionable Dances of the Day" that gave advice to anyone constructing a program for a ball, based on what was fashionable in New York City at the time:

those [dances] which are the most popular here in New York, for instance, are universally recognized as the dances correct for any entertainment which may be given elsewhere

New York attitudes appear not to have changed in the slightest in the last century.

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.

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.

Note the implications of "conjugal" there.  In their sudden concern for "propriety", the French were abandoning the relatively innocent country dance in favor of dances like the waltz and galop that kept the dancers in each others' arms and had thoroughly scandalized the English in the early decades of the century.

The above alone would be an interesting tidbit about the changing popularity of particular dance forms in the 1830s, the tradition of partner-changing (or not), and the differences between the ballrooms of France and England.  But the author then goes on to smugly insult the French by implying that the reason for these "contracts of fidelity" was some "internal weakness" of upper-class French ladies, who had to be protected from the least temptation, to which they would presumably succumb:

Their constancy to their partner would appear but a poor offering when they fear to endanger it by interchanging it with another. 

The English were not exactly in a position to criticize the morals of the French in this area, but underneath the geopolitical sniping, there is an interesting point of ballroom etiquette. 

Stars and Stripes

At the turning of the twentieth century, St. Louis dancing master Jacob Mahler contacted his colleagues across the United States to assemble a set of original cotillion figures -- not in the sense of the 18th-century French square dance, but in that of the party-games-with-dancing, some quite silly, which by the end of the nineteenth century had metastasized into events of their own, separate from formal balls.  Using these figures, Mahler assembled a small handbook: Original Cotillion Figures (St. Louis, 1900).  The very first figure given, courtesy of Walter L. Curtis of Utica, New York, was called "Stars and Stripes" and seems particularly timely as America celebrates Independence Day.

This is a geometric figure with a mixer element rather than a silly one, but it is a "property" figure, meaning that it requires props, in this case small American flags.  It's not clear exactly how many are used; it could be either one per dancer or one per couple.  If one per couple, the conductor of the cotillion should decide which gender retains the flag when the couples separate and reunite in different pairs. 

The original figure is for thirty-two dancers.  I'll go ahead and describe the figure for thirty-two, but the number of dancers could be adjusted, provided it remains divisible by four.  The music should be John Philip Sousa's famous march, "The Stars and Stripes Forever".  Sheet music and recordings of this piece are easy to find.  The base couple dance for this figure is the two-step.

1. Eight couples, having acquired their flags, two-step around the room.

2. At the conductor's signal, they separate and each seek another partner, with whom they continue to two-step.

3. At the next signal, four couples form a column of couples in each corner of the room.

4. At the next signal, the columns of couples march on the diagonal toward the center.  When  they meet, they separate, gentlemen turning left and ladies right at 45-degree angles, and march toward the walls side-by-side with a new partner.

5. Upon reaching the wall, take this new partner and two-step.

This really is a neat little figure.  The dancers form a sort of asterisk, coming in to the center in the form of an "x" and going out to the wall in the form of a cross.  If the couples arrange themselves suitably in the corners, each person dances with two or three different partners during the course of the figure. 

One doesn't have to wait for Independence Day to do this figure, but it would certainly be extremely appropriate for a July ball or any event with a patriotic theme.