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.
Did you spot it?
Look at the first sentence of the second second paragraph. It starts with "Hop forward again on the left foot". Now do you see it? Or, more to the point, do you not see it?
If you've read the instructions carefully, you have hopefully noticed that "again" makes no sense here. There is no other hop to repeat. There is, however something deeply wrong with these instructions.
We have a pretty good grasp of what the racket and its waltz-time variations were. The descriptions of them are remarkably consistent across many different sources. None of them involve turning around and repeating anything facing in the opposite direction. None of them have a second part in which the couple "take positions as in the waltz"; they're already in that position. And they certainly don't end by joining hands to "advance as before".
But doesn't that pattern sound familiar? It should. It's a portion of one of the most popular patterns for the myriad sequence dances of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, many of which look roughly like this:
1. Do something side by side moving along the line of dance
2. Turn around and do the same thing moving against the line of dance
3. Take closed position and do whatever couple dance is appropriate to the music
Among the many, many examples are the Rye Waltz, the Berlin, and the Bon Ton Gavotte. In fact, the last two paragraphs look a lot like the end of the Berlin, during which the dancers hop (again!), turn, repeat the motions, then take waltz position and polka.
Do you see what happened there?
This is not just a really peculiar sort of racket. Rackets are not sequence dances; they're normal couple dances with no choreographed floor pattern. Their only quirk is a failure to rotate in the typical fashion.
What we actually have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a printing error. And it was somewhat unfair of me to set a trap like this for a group of novice reconstructors and sit around smirking quietly while they dutifully tried to come up with a reconstruction. But there's an important lesson I wanted them to learn, and I'm repeating here so that everyone who cares can learn it to:
Dance manuals sometimes contain large-scale mistakes.
Not just errors in the technical aspects of the dances, though those certainly happen as well. (Among the most common are swapping right foot for left or vice-versa.) Printing mishaps. Missing or misordered pages. Bits of two different publications bound together with the pages interspersed. And, in at least two other cases I can think of, layout errors involving sticking the second half of the instructions for one dance onto the end of another dance. I briefly mentioned an example of this on Kickery once: the tail end of the instructions for a 1914 gavotte appeared in the second edition of Dance Mad (St. Louis, 1914) on a separate page, attached to a description of the half and half.
Wilkinson's book is not the most carefully produced manual I've ever seen. It has two completely separate but technically identical descriptions of the two-step. And there's a technical error in the description of the Berlin Polka, where it says to hop on the left foot and then hop "again" on the right foot, which ought to sound vaguely familiar...
It's impossible to say for certain what the sequence dance of the last two paragraphs is. But it looks suspiciously like the end of the Berlin, except with the correct "hop again" on the left foot. Is this a second set of Berlin instructions? A corrected version that didn't make it onto the right page, perhaps? Or is it just a similar dance, perhaps the Alsacian? It could be either, or some other dance entirely; we just don't have enough of it to say.
But the one thing it is not is the second part of a racket.
Oh, and that first paragraph? It's just a minimalist description of the two-slide racket with -- surprise! -- an error in the details. The two slides are on the first two beats of the measure, not the first beat alone.
Comments