Capering & Kickery

May 2015 Gig Calendar

Lots of fun ahead in May!  I'll spend the early part of the month in Moscow teaching an experimental new class in 16th century improvisation at the Anno Domini festival before heading back home for a Regency ball and then to Boston to spin some blues and back to New York City for some ragtime!

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Friday-Tuesday, May 1st-5th ~ Moscow, Russia
Festival of Historical Dance - Anno Domini (Фестиваль Старинного танца Anno Domini-2015) (ВКонтакте)
Teaching sixteenth-century Italian dance focusing on improvisational techniques

Saturday, May 9th ~ Essex, Connecticut
Sailing Masters 1814 Commemoration Ball (Facebook event)
8:00-11:00pm.  Formal early 19th-century ball; costume strongly encouraged.  Tickets on sale now!

Monday, May 11th ~ New Haven, Connecticut
Cross-Step Waltz Lesson Series (Advanced Beginner) (Facebook event)
7:00-8:00pm.  Cross-step waltz class four of five.

Tuesday, May 12th ~ Cambridge, Massachusetts (Boston area)
Bluesy Tuesy (Facebook event)
7:30-11:00pm (lesson then dancing).  DJing blues from 9:45-11:00.

Thursday, May 14th ~ Somerville, Massachusetts (Boston area)
Blues Union (Facebook event)
7:30-11:00pm (lessons until 9:30 then dancing).  DJing blues from 9:30-10:30.

Sunday, May 17th ~ New York City
Ragtime (1910s) Dance Workshop (Facebook event)
3:30-5:00pm.  Beginner-friendly class - specific details TBA.

Monday, May 18th ~ New Haven, Connecticut
Cross-Step Waltz Lesson Series (Advanced Beginner) (Facebook event)
7:00-8:00pm.  Cross-step waltz class five of five.

Saturday, May 23rd ~ Moscow/YouTube
Scientific Seminar "History of Dance" (Научный семинар "История танца")
Online presentation on Victorian dance teacher Mrs. Nicholas Henderson for monthly Russian seminar.

Wednesday, May 27th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Jane Austen Era Dancing (Facebook event)
8:00-9:30pm.  Beginner-friendly dancing.  No costume needed.

Sunday,  May 31st ~ New York City
Regency Dance Workshop (Facebook event)
3:00-5:00pm.  Beginner-friendly lesson.  No costume needed.

Events and workshops further in the future may be found on the Gig Calendar!

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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: May 10-11, 18-29
New York City: May 16-17, 30-31

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Coming in June: Steampunk in the Catskills and then some much-needed research and writing time before heading back to Russia at the end of the month.  See the Gig Calendar for further-out events and workshops!

Downfall of Paris (American contra)

The first thing to know about the tune "Downfall of Paris" is that, contrary to some references, it is not the same tune as that which goes with the song "Ça Ira".  It is rhythmically similar at the beginning -- hence the confusion -- and there's a vague thematic connection, but it's not quite the same piece of music.  Regency dancing master Thomas Wilson explained this succinctly in his Companion to the Ballroom (London, c1816):

To account for the unusual length of this tune — it was originally composed for a Quick March, in opposition & partly taken from the French National Air of Ça Ira, it has since become a favorite dance particularly with good dancers, as it requires a very long figure not easily performed by Tyros in the Art…

Note that when Wilson says a "favorite dance" he means a "favorite tune for dancing".  Good dancers apparently liked long tunes so that they could show off by setting lengthy combinations of figures to them.  And, indeed, various figure combinations were set to arrangements of it during the early nineteenth century in both England and America.  

A much longer explanation of the tune's history and association with "Ça Ira", may be found on the blog of the noted percussionist Robin Engelman, who has tracked down many musical manuscript sources and done such a thorough job explaining it all that I will simply refer you to his article, which helpfully includes a number of sound clips.

Its use as a dance tune (and that of "Ça Ira") during the Regency era might be an interesting topic, but it's not what I'm discussing today.

Norwich honors Vernon Castle

A charming little tidbit from England:

At the instigation of "Wymondham historian, author and cinema buff Philip Yaxley", a room at the Millennium Library in Norwich has been named after the famous ragtime-era dancer Vernon Castle, who was born Vernon Blyth in Norwich in 1887.  The website of the Norwich Evening News has a nice article by Derek James that does a reasonable job of summing up Vernon's life with an emphasis on his connections to his hometown.  The campaign for the honor seems to have kicked off in 2012, per another James article at the Eastern Daily Press.

The article includes an interesting little slideshow with high-quality images pulled from Yaxley's collection.  They include not merely the familiar posed dance shots of Vernon and his wife Irene but also photos of related sites in Norwich (his childhood home, the street where he was born), an adorable childhood picture of him in school clothes, and an advertising broadside for a Norwich showing of the Castles' pseudo-biographical 1915 film The Whirl of Life.

I don't know anything about Yaxley except that he has published a few books on the area's history and, unless Norwich is well-populated by men of that name, appears to have died last year.  I wonder if his collection is still together? 

The library hosts the county Heritage Centre, which, per yet another article, is gathering material for an exhibition on the Castles next month.

(Edited 5/29/2015 to add: it looks like the exhibit is on, but only for the month of May -- anyone in that part of England, hurry to get there before it closes!)

Edwardian Twerking and the Tragic Fate of Miss Plunkett

(For those coming late to the party: this was originally posted on APRIL FOOL'S DAY.  You may thereby deduce that it is an extended joke, not serious dance history!)

Many dance historians specializing in Western European and American social dance first became aware of the existence of twerking in the context of the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards, during which the performer Miley Cyrus notoriously twerked with singer Robin Thicke.  Twerking, of course, has a substantially longer history both in the hip-hop scene in the United States, dating back to the African-American community in New Orleans in the early 1990s, and still further back to its origins in the dances of West Africa. 

Over the course of dance history, however, many dances make brief early splashes in western society and then vanish, only to reappear somewhat later.  Dances like the maxixe took more than one appearance to achieve any kind of popularity (and, arguably, didn't really achieve it until further mutating into samba).  What has not been widely known before today is that twerking may be counted among these dances, with substantial visual evidence of an early form of twerking in Europe more than a century ago.