Capering & Kickery

August 2015 Gig Calendar

After an exhausting July, August will be a quiet month for me with a bunch of little trips (research and otherwise) scattered through it and catch-up work on several much-delayed projects.

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Tuesday, August 4th ~ Cambridge, Massachusetts (Boston area)
Bluesy Tuesy (Facebook event)
7:30-11:00pm (lesson then dancing).  DJing blues from 9:45-11:00.

Wednesday, August 26th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Jane Austen Era Dancing (Facebook event)
Beginner-friendly dancing 8:00-9:30pm.  No costume needed.

Sunday, August 30th ~ New York City
Regency Dance Workshop (Facebook event)
Beginner-friendly lesson 3:00-5:00pm.  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: August 1-3, 7-10, 13-16, 26-28, 31
Boston: August 4-6
New York: August 12, 29-30

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See the Gig Calendar for further-out events and workshops!

Early Foxtrot: The Castle Favorite

Along with the standard early variations that come up repeatedly in the 1910s, there are also numerous little foxtrot variants that turn up only once and were probably not generally popular.  Despite the name, the "Castle Favorite", presumably a reference to the famous ballroom dancers and teachers Vernon and Irene Castle, does not turn up in any source I have that is actually by the Castles.  Instead, it appears in Edna Stuart Lee's Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916), a wonderful little source for unusual early foxtrot variations.  I don't necessarily rule out a connection with the Castles, but given how creative Lee was with variation-names, I am not taking it as a given without some actual proof.

Lee calls this a "rather difficult step, requiring considerable practice and possibly not adapted to ordinary social dancing".  That seems an exaggerated level of concern to me; it's not difficult to dance or to lead, and I see no reason not to include it in social dancing other than it being too uncommon to bother learning.

I used the Castle Favorite (along with the Cavalry Charge) recently in a dance reconstruction class in Novosibirsk, Russia, as an exercise for my students in reconstructing basic ragtime dance variations.  They mostly came up with pretty much the same result I did, after some clarification of  "over" vs. "over to" (as in "Draw the right over to the left.")  All props to them, since they were forced to work in a language they don't speak natively!

The Castle Favorite is done in a standard close ballroom hold, traveling along the line of dance, with the gentleman going forward and the lady backward.  The gentleman's steps are given below; the lady dances opposite.

The Castle Favorite
12        Two walking steps: left, right   [two other steps removed for musicality]
3&4&  Four trots: left, right, left, right
1&2     Hop on the right foot, step left, and close the right foot without weight
3&4     Hop on the left foot, step right, and close the left foot without weight

Counted as slow and quick steps, this would be SS QQQQ QQS QQS. 

For social use: the hop is easily led; the lady will feel it immediately.  The only remotely tricky bit is making sure that the closes of the feet in the third and fourth bars are without weight.  The gentleman needs to make it clear that his weight is staying on the original foot.  But it's more likely that a lady unfamiliar with the variation will not close her foot at all, or simply let it drift in, since closing without weight is not a very leadable movement.

Note that as in the Cavalry Charge, I have modified Lee's opening to eliminate an additional two slow steps at the beginning because I find Lee's tendency to do a three-bar introductory sequence (four walks and four trots) irritating and the resulting five-bar sequence musically annoying to dance.  (I discussed this in more detail in my post on that variation, here.)

We have a problem here...

Written on the Trans-Siberian Railroad somewhere between Novosibirsk and Moscow.  Just had to mention that!

At left is a page from a dance manual published in Philadelphia in 1904: Dancing Without an Instructor, by one Professor Wilkinson.  This is one of the challenges I gave to the students in my just-completed reconstruction class in Novosibirsk.  Could they reconstruct this version of the racket?

If you want to test yourself with it, click the image to enlarge it, but before diving into the technical details of the dance, take a step back mentally and read through the instructions as a whole.  Notice anything weird?

You should.  

Don't click through to the rest of the post until you think you've got it.

Dance on a Royal Progress, 1842

In the summer of 1842, twenty-three-year-old Queen Victoria, depicted at left in that year by the German painter Franz Xaver Winterhalter, made a Royal Progress to Scotland, the first of many trips to the north and the beginning of her lifelong love of this part of her realm.  She was two years married to Prince Albert and already the mother of two children, whom she left behind on this trip.  Her third child would be born almost exactly nine months later.

The progress was thoroughly documented, at Victoria's request, by a Scottish baronet and author, Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, who was the author of both novels and nonfiction about travel in Scotland.  His work, Memorial of the royal progress in Scotland, was published in 1843 in Edinburgh, London, and Dublin.

Lauder must have had exceptional access to the royal party during the journey.  He made a point of documenting every detail he could, including the weather, the guests at each dinner, the gowns worn by the queen and other important women, every attractive corner of the landscape that Victoria paused to survey, lyrics to songs sung to her in both English and Gaelic, and what seemed like every single change of carriage horses during the trip.  

Lauder's prose is ornate:

Reclining on her couch, on the deck of a gallant vessel, borne rapidly over those waves, the bulwarks of her island empire, graciously condescending to give her presence in friendly guise to her brave and hardy defenders, whose sinewy forms, and bold and weather-beaten countenances, were pledges for the peacefulness of her shores, whilst their light-hearted jollity, and laughing eyes, bespoke their felicity under the reign of a Sovereign who could thus sympathize with them in their harmless sports, Her Majesty was the very personification of Britannia, riding triumphantly over the ocean, surrounded by the guardian spirits of the waves.  (p. 42)

Since the book includes nearly five hundred pages in this style, plus an introduction and a thirty-five page index that gives a diagram of her yacht and a list of every building mentioned, it is quite a chore to plow through.  Happily, no one else will need to suffer through it for the sake of dance references!