Capering & Kickery

November 2014 Gig Calendar

November starts out crazy with New York, Boston, and Gettyburg trips the first three weekends and then calms down at the end of the month as I get a head start on my holiday research/writing period by hibernating over Thanksgiving weekend.

Here are the details so far, with potential blues DJing still TBD now with added blues DJing:

Sunday, November 2nd ~ New York City
Regency Dance Workshop (Facebook event)
Beginner-friendly lesson 3:00-5:00pm.  No costume needed.

Tuesday, November 4th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Jane Austen Era Dancing (Facebook event)
Beginner-friendly lesson 8:15-9:30pm.  No costume needed.

Wednesdays, November 5th-19th ~ New Haven, Connecticut
Five-week cross-step waltz workshop series continues! (Facebook event)
Experienced dancers may still join on November 5th.  After that, the class is closed!

Thursday, November 6th ~ Somerville, Massachusetts (Boston area)
Blues Union (Facebook event)
7:30-11:30pm (lessons 7:30-9:30, dancing 9:30-11:30).  DJing the first set from 9:30-10:30pm.

Saturday, November 8th ~ Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts (Boston area)
Regency Dance Workshop (Facebook event)
Composing, calling, and dancing country dances.  12:00-3:00pm.  No costume needed.

Sunday, November 9th ~ Concord, Massachusetts (Boston area)
Cross-Step Waltz Workshops for Mostly Waltz Boston (Facebook event)
Basic and intermediate lesson followed by DJing some dance time!

Friday & Saturday, November 14th & 15th ~ Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
Remembrance Day Balls (two!) (Facebook page)
Dinner & dancing both nights!  1860s costume.  Some tickets still available both nights!

Saturday, November 22nd ~ Norwich, Connecticut
Private event.  Cancelled!

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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 Haven & Middletown, Connecticut: November 1, 3-5, 10-13, 17-20, 24-30
Boston: November 6-9
Gettysburg: November 15-16
Philadelphia area: November 21-23

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Coming in December: very little, as I retreat from public life for my holiday research/writing time.

The Tango Burglar, 1914

I'm sure it's as much a function of having a surfeit of presses, and thus newspapers and magazines aplenty, as a surfeit of stuffiness, but it does feel like I can always rely on Massachusetts publications to put moral panic about dance into print.  This 1914 warning about the dangers of tango seems to have originated in the New Bedford Standard and was reprinted in various other papers, including The Cincinnati Enquirer (October 31, 1914) and The Washington Post (November 1, 1914).  I can't tell whether it was based on any actual incident or was just a fictional piece of alarmism, but it doesn't really matter.  What I find interesting are the social anxieties it reveals about the tango fad.

Who are the tango burglars?  Lower-class men, of course: "[dance] professionals, ex-chorus men, tenderloin habitues and worse".  Women whose husbands, brothers, and sweethearts do not have sufficient time and skill to dance with them meet these men in "trotteries" and restaurants.  And then they invite them home for more, ah, dancing:

In this way intimacies sprang up that in ordinary times would have been imposssible -- intimacies that resulted, now and then, in the admission of the dancing partners to the home.

And what do these men do there besides dance?  In between "promiscuous intimacies" on the dance floor -- and doesn't that phrasing hint at activities that presumably would not be discussed on the pages of a newspaper? -- they burgle the home!

It's a variation of the classic complaint about dance all the way from the Renaissance to From the Ballroom to Hell to Dirty Dancing:

popular dance -> association with the lower classes -> moral corruption/crime/bad end

I expect the intended message was more that tango was a dangerous lower-class habit leading to moral and financial ruin (particularly for women) than that men should keep their dance skills up lest their home be burgled and their wives, sisters, and sweethearts enjoy "intimacies" with better dancers, but from my twenty-first century perspective, the latter is something to keep in mind. 

I can't help but think that a Tango Burglar would be a fun Halloween costume, though when I mentally combine, say, Rudolph Valentino and a classic little black burglar mask I come out with something a bit too much like Zorro!

The full text is below.

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THE TANGO BURGLAR
| New Bedford Standard |

We have had the tango dance, the tango shade or color, the tango tea, the tango shoe, the tango pantalettes, and now we have the tango burglar.  His chance has come through the letting down of social barriers which has characterized the present dancing mania.  Because they have had more time to devote to it, women have learned the new dances faster than their husbands, brothers and sweethearts, who have been engaged in such sordid pursuits as earning money to keep the concern going.  The proficient male dancers have been professionals, ex-chorus men, tenderloin habitues and worse, whose social, not to say moral, antecedents would have borne very close scrutiny.  Being good dancers, however, they have been in demand at the trotteries and restaurants that have made a specialty of dancing.  If they danced well that was all that was required.  In this way intimacies sprang up that in ordinary times would have been imposssible -- intimacies that resulted, now and then, in the admission of the dancing partners to the home.  Where terpsichorean skill was the only test, with no questions asked about morals or respectability, it is not surprising that such promiscuous intimacies should have opened an easy way to a burglar to ply his trade.  One such has already been caught in New York, and, while the police are trying to fasten a series of burglaries upon him, the women who were robbed are trying hard to hush the matter up less they be subjected to unpleasant notoriety.

A 3/4-time grapevine sequence, 1914

I've had sequence dances on my mind recently after some discussion earlier this week, which reminded me of this little sequence from the the second edition of F. Leslie Clendenen's 1914 compilation Dance Mad.  It appears there under the name "American Grapevine Dance" by Anthony J. Giaconia of Springfield, Massachusetts.  I know nothing about Mr. Giaconia except that on June 24, 1912, he was quoted on the front page of The Indianapolis News as one of a convention of dancing masters appalled by dances like the Grizzly Bear and Bunny Hug.  He found some dancing in a park there so disgraceful that it ought to be stopped "for the sake of decency".

The Grapevine Dance is so short (only eight bars) that it doesn't feel long enough to be a sequence dance all on its own, but the two measures in which the dancers move directly into the center of the room and back make it mildly risky to use simply as a variation; moving abruptly back and forth across the line of dance can cause problems for dancers coming up behind.  Doing this from an "inside lane" near the center of the room will be more polite if it is not being done in unison as a sequence dance.

The sequence is performed in a normal ballroom hold, traveling along the line of dance.  The gentleman starts facing the wall and the lady the center of the room.  He starts with the left foot and she with the right.

American Grapevine Dance (eight bars)
1b    Three-slide galop & half-turn (slide-close-slide-close-slide, 1&2&3)
1b    Three-slide galop & half-turn (slide-close-slide-close-slide, 4&5&6)
2b    Four steps of grapevine (side-cross behind-side-cross front, 1234), then step to the side and close (56)
1b    Three "trotting" steps straight back to center of the room (123)
1b    Three "trotting" steps forward (456)
2b    Four steps of grapevine (side-cross behind-side-cross front, 1234), then step to the side and close (56)

On the grapevines, the ladies cross in front first and then behind.  On the trotting steps they move first forward then back.

The reconstruction is quite straightforward; the only part that gave me any pause was a note that

In making the first step in the Grapevine in part 2 from last movement of part 1, it is necessary for the gentleman to make a three-quarter turn to the right so that the gentleman's back is turned to the line of direction and finish Grapevine from that position.  This makes a very fascinating step.

That didn't immediately make sense to me, but I think what is meant is that the dancers make a half-turn at the end of the second three-slide (which is done "over elbows") to get back to their starting orientation (gentleman facing wall/lady center).  The first step of the grapevine is sideways along the line of dance, but on the second (crossing) step, the man crosses behind and very briefly has his back to the line of dance before again stepping sideways along line of dance and crossing in front to finish the grapevine. 

No specific music is given; the only advice is for slow 3/4 time, specifically "three-step music".  Three-step is one of those unusual dances that turn up very occasionally on dance cards (such as this 1910 one), but I haven't done enough work with it to have a good feel for what makes a piece three-step music as opposed to waltz music.  The sequence does work nicely with waltz music at about 120 beats per minute. It is quite leadable with a good follower, even one who does not know it. 

Special thanks to Marci for demonstrating how leadable this dance is!

Battle Confetti

One hundred and sixteen years ago today, the magazine Harper's Bazaar published a brief blurb predicting fashionable dances for the winter would be of "military tone", no doubt influenced by the burst of patriotic fervor occasioned by the brief Spanish-American War, which by the autumn of 1898 had moved into peace negotiations.  The article gives a quick peek at what dances interested Americans (or, at least, American dancing masters) in the second-to-last winter of the nineteenth century.

Ending a Grand March

In almost seven years of writing Kickery (has it really been that long?) I think I've only once said anything at all detailed about the Grand March, which was generally performed as the opening dance at American balls in the latter part of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, though occasionally it appears later on the program.  Clearly an overview is overdue!

This isn't it.

While working recently on the ball program for a pair of Civil War-era balls to be held in Gettysburg in November, I started wondering idly how many ways there were to end a Grand March.  So I made a little list.  I won't be using most of these, alas; the Gettysburg balls are insanely crowded and thus do not lend themselves to really interesting Marches.  But I thought it might be fun to share some of the possibilities.

Basic Foxtrots from Edna Lee

Earlier this year I talked about nine different variations from the handy little booklet Edna Stuart Lee's Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916) in two mini-series, starting here (three posts) and here (two posts).  My choice of sequences may have given the impression that Lee's collection was mostly odd little variations with (often) even odder names (Chaplin Trot, anyone?)  That's because I was skipping over the simplest sequences given by Lee, since I have encountered them elsewhere and written about them, or similar sequences, in earlier posts. 

Here, I'm going to give a quick rundown of eight very basic sequences that Lee included among her more unusual and/or unique ones so that it is clear that there was a certain basic repertoire overlapping what is found in many other sources.

German Waltz (American contra dance)

This simple and attractive waltz contra dance figure appears under the name German Waltz in at least two of the mid-nineteenth-century dance manuals of Boston musician, caller, and author Elias Howe, as well as under the name Narragansett Waltz in at least one other.  I first encountered it under the German Waltz name, so that is the one I habitually use, though the association with the tune(s) "Narragansett Waltz" actually came a few years earlier and both names seem to belong belong to the tunes rather than the dance figures.  

My interest in reconstructing this dance arose from a desire for a mid-century waltz country dance that could satisfy dancers the same way the Spanish Dance does and thus occasionally replace it at balls.  I love the Spanish Dance, but after more than two decades of dancing and calling it, a little variety is pleasant!

Along with being a nice change of pace socially, the German Waltz also makes an excellent performance piece.  Most longways country dances are not particularly good performance pieces, since the nature of the longways formation means that the dancers spend a lot of time with their backs to the audience.  In the German Waltz, the dancers spend most of their time either facing up and down the set or waltzing in a circle.  This makes it a much more audience-friendly dance.

October 2014 Gig Calendar

Most of this month will be relatively quiet time at home getting ready for my annual Regency Assembly and doing workshops in preparation for that.  At the end of the month I'll be traveling south to Baltimore/Washington and North Carolina, then will be home to start a series of regular weekly waltz workshops.  No blues DJing this month, alas!

A few details are still to be worked out, but here's the overall schedule:

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

Tuesday, October 7th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Jane Austen Era Dancing (Facebook event)
Beginner-friendly lesson 8:15-9:30pm.  No costume needed.

Sunday, October 12th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Nineteenth-Century Waltz Workshop (Facebook event)
Beginner-friendly lesson 3:00-5:00pm.  No costume needed.

Saturday, October 18th ~ New Haven, Connecticut
The Twelfth Annual Regency Assembly -- A Vauxhall Masquerade!  (Facebook event)
Dance workshop & ball with live music!

Sunday, October 26th ~ Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, area
Cross-step waltz and 1910s hesitation waltz & foxtrot workshops for Triangle Vintage Dance (Facebook event)

Wednesday, October 29th ~ New Haven, Connecticut
Five-week cross-step waltz workshop series begins! (Facebook event)

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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 Haven & Middletown, Connecticut: October 1-2, 6-20, 28-31
New York City: October 4-5
Baltimore/Washington area: October 22

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Coming in November: waltz workshops in Boston, TWO Remembrance Day Balls in Gettysburg, and Regency everywhere!