The classic schottische of the mid-nineteenth century and its later incarnation, the Barn Dance (a.k.a. the Military Schottische and the Pas de Quatre) had mostly faded from fashionable ballrooms by the late 1910s. But a few very simple schottisches or schottische-like sequences turn up now and then in dance manuals and on sheet music of the 1910s, often under the name "gavotte", a musical form with the same 4/4 meter characteristic of the schottische.
La Gavotte is a short sequence taken from Professor A. Lacasse's La Danse apprise chez soi, published in Montréal in 1918. There were many dances called "gavotte" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not all of them in 4/4 time, so while this particular gavotte may have been locally popular in Montréal, it should not be considered any sort of definitive gavotte for the 1910s or any other era.
Lacasse described La Gavotte as one of several "Danses de Fantaisie", a group which also included the Ostende, the Spanish Boston, Bellfield, and the Oxford Minuet. It's hard to know exactly how to translate "danses de fantaisie", which literally means "imaginative dances", but all of those given are sequences, though some are very short ones. He noted that these dances were still on programs and were danced mainly "in our private families", which implies that they were traditional favorites rather than the very latest fashion.
La Gavotte apparently was notable enough to be listed on the title page, along with the one-step and foxtrot, as one of the principal dances in the book, though that may well be a sign more of how trendy the name "gavotte" was than of the popularity of this particular sequence.
Recent Comments