Capering & Kickery

September 2015 Gig Calendar

Well, my attempt to stay at home in August and work on projects turned into spending more than half the month on the road to various libraries, events, and family members.  That was fun, and I made some intriguing discoveries and moved various research projects along, but it was not what I really needed to be doing.

So let's try this one more time:

I am spending September at home getting things done.  Not even a library trip.  I may add one or two little local(ish) classes to this very short list, but the plan is to stay home this month and then go back on the road in October.

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Sunday, September 27th ~ New York City
Regency Dance Workshop (Facebook event)
Beginner-friendly lesson 3:00-5:00pm.  No costume needed.

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

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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: September 1-3, 7-26, 28-30
New York: September 27th

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Coming in October: back on the road again with a quick trips to Pittsburgh, New York, and Boston followed by this year's Regency Assembly, Un Bal à Paris (A Ball in Paris)!

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

Jackson, Otis, a Huntsman, and the Girls of Belfast

I could justify calling this dance, and by extension this post, any of the following:

• Jackson at New Orleans
• Huntsman's Hornpipe
• Girls of Belfast
• Otis's Quickstep

Obviously, I punted.

The dance in question appears attached to all these names in various mid-19th century sources.  Elias Howe was partial to the first two, which are the tunes under which the figures appeared in his Improved Edition of the Musician’s Omnibus (Boston, 1861).  They reappeared without music, again under both names, in Howe's American dancing master, and ball-room prompter (Boston 1862).  In H. G.O. Washburn's The ball-room manual of contra dances and social cotillons (Belfast, Maine, and Boston, 1863), by contrast, the same figures turned up under the name "Girls of Belfast" for the tune "Otis's Quickstep".

I feel more and more suspicious of the whole idea of naming contra dance figures in mid-nineteenth-century America.  At a minimum, one certainly has some options in naming this dance and choosing a tune, and I am coming to the conclusion that in New England in the mid-nineteenth century one could attach any figures to any suitable tune, as in earlier eras.  Howe certainly seems to have done so with abandon.

But for whatever it's worth, here are the two pieces from Howe, with the figures:

 "Otis's Quickstep" is available online at the University of Tennessee's Sheet Music Collection.  Neither I nor the library have been able to date that music very precisely, but it must be from after 1835, when the Boston Brass Band was founded, and is probably from 1864 or earlier, since that's when Baltimore publisher F. D. Benteen (better known for publishing some of Stephen Foster's works) died.  

Thoughts on teaching polka and polka redowa

I recently had the opportunity to watch another teacher do a general introduction to the standard mid-nineteenth century couple dances.  That's a rarer event than you'd imagine.  Historical dance teachers aren't that thick on the ground, and even at multi-teacher festivals, either there aren't any introductory classes or I'm busy teaching my own classes during them. 

Watching this class reminded me of something I've been meaning to write up for months about altering how we teach this repertoire.  This doesn't apply to the one-night-stand sort of teaching gig, but I think it's something other teachers with ongoing classes may find useful.

Pioneer Dance in the Northwest

This post is less research than a summary of someone else's work and a plan for possible future research.  

While digging idly around the internet in preparation for a private trip to the Northwest, I came across a fascinating article by award-winning fiddler Vivian Williams on pioneer fiddlers in the northwestern United States.  The article covers primarily nineteenth-century fiddlers, with a few from the twentieth century whose music continued in the pioneer musical tradition.  Ms. Williams' article may be found here, along with a biography of her and her husband and musical partner Phil and a great deal of other information about their work with historical music and dance in the northwest.

While I greatly enjoy fiddle music, my major interest in music research lies in where it intersects with dance history.  Happily, many of these pioneer fiddlers played for dancing, and many of the dance tunes they played are listed by Ms. Williams, giving an interesting snapshot of some of the dancing of the nineteenth and early twentieth century northwestern frontier.  I don't have a special interest in frontier dance, but there are quite a few areas of dance history that I once claimed to have no interest in (cotillions, sigh) but now find myself spending a lot of time researching.  So I've gone through the article, pulled out and summarized the dance-related bits, and added some background detail.

While I cover the dance information thoroughly below, I would highly recommend reading the entire article as well.  There's a lot of background on the various fiddlers and plenty of amusing anecdotes.  She also includes citations and links to many of the articles from which she pulled her information, of which there is enough in the article alone to construct an entire evening of dancing as done in this corner of North America in the mid- to late nineteenth century!  It would probably be very fruitful to go through the numerous sources listed in the article looking for dance mentions not linked to fiddling.  Someday when I have plenty of free time...

Dance in Sarah Morgan Dawson's Diary, 1862-1865

I came across a mention of Sarah Morgan Dawson's diary on an American Civil War reenactment Facebook page and took a quick flip through it for dance references before settling down on a long bus ride this week to read the whole thing.  Sarah kept her diary from early 1862 to late 1865.  A transcription was published by her son after her death under the title A Confederate Girl's Diary (1913).  The whole transcription is online at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's site Documenting the American South.  

Sarah Fowler Morgan (Sarah Morgan Dawson after her marriage), pictured at left, was a 20-year-old Louisiana citizen from a prominent family when the war began.  Her family split, with one brother and sister staying on the Union side and three other brothers fighting in the Confederate military.  Sarah and her remaining sister, Miriam, were ardent secessionists as well.  The diary tells the story of the sisters' efforts to survive in the company of their widowed mother, married sister, and sister-in-law (and her children) during the invasion and occupation of rebel Louisiana.  There is some basic background on the diary and the war in Louisiana here.

I'm not going to discuss the whole diary in-depth, but it does provide some interesting insights into the mindset and proper behavior of the southern lady during this era; period etiquette in action, as it were.  It is also just as problematic as you'd expect in perpetuating the idea of the happy "servants" (slaves).  Sarah's periodic laments about how awful it would be for the Yankees to spoil this jolly way of life can be grating.  But her ability to look past the conflict and see the various Union officers as individuals is impressive, as is the way in which, with relatives on both sides, she balanced patriotism and family feeling.

As far as dance goes, this is not Gone with the Wind.  The family frequently flees from one refuge to another, sometimes on the brink of starvation.  No one is holding any balls.  But some informal dancing does occur, and there are a few brief references to add to my store of knowledge about mid-nineteenth century American dance practice.

I've included page references below for all the excerpts; to find the originals, simply search the page number on the online transcription. 

Time after time

The joke at left (click to enlarge the image) came across my Facebook feed recently, and while I see why it's making people laugh and then tag me to share it, it's actually one of those jokes that is completely spoiled by knowing anything about dance.

The humor is based on what "everybody knows": waltz is a 3/4 time dance.  So one can't do it in 4/4.  Obviously!

The problem is that what "everybody knows" is completely wrong.  The entire history of social dance, right up to present-day ballroom dancing, involves the basic principle that dances and dance steps can be converted from one time signature to another.  

(Yeah, yeah, I know...someone is wrong on the internet.  I just can't resist this time!)

To take a few examples:

One-Step Variations: The Outer Edge

One of the things I do on long bus trips is watch videos, and one of the videos I've been watching recently is clips of the famous 1910s dance couple Vernon and Irene Castle dancing in their quasi-autobiographical 1915 silent film, The Whirl of Life.  

The Castles can be maddeningly unclear writers, but they were unquestionably superb dancers, and their book, Modern Dancing (1914), is not the sort of random compilation of other people's steps that you see in other works of this era.  So I assume that anything that they thought to put in it must be something they considered important, and, when I have time, I try to match up step descriptions with their actual performance to see how what they wrote comports with what they did on the dance floor.

One of the moves that I'd never done much with before is quaintly entitled "The Outer Edge".  Here is the Castles' description, from Modern Dancing:

The man steps out to the right side of the lady with his right foot.  He then steps to side with his left, draws the right up to it, completing the Draw to the left.  The Draw Step is danced in front of the lady.  To do this the man steps to his side, one count -- that is, when he crosses his foot over his left.  Now he brings the lady directly in front of him, continuing the step in that position the three remaining counts.  This step can be combined very easily with any of the other steps, as it is simply a walk.  The lady starts backward by crossing the left foot in back of the right.  She steps out to the right side with the right, draws the left up to it, completing the Draw Step.

I did mention that the Castles were not the clearest writers.

The Dip Schottische

The Dip Schottische is one of the minor schottische sequences created by dancing masters in the early 1910s.  In this case, the author was one I. C. Sampson, of Lynn, Massachusetts, and the dance was published in both the first and second editions of F. Leslie Clendenen's compilation Dance Mad (St. Louis, 1914).  Unfortunately, the dance instructions have one major ambiguity that makes it very difficult to come to a definitive reconstruction: what, exactly, does "turn" mean?  Here's the original language for one move in the dance:

"One Step" turn (pivot, four steps, two measures)

The problem is that there is no single "one step turn".  There are at least two very plausible candidates: the spin and the traveling turn, better known today as pivots.  If I had to guess which would be the "one step turn", I'd guess the spin, but there are some problems with that in regard to this particular sequence.  But there are problems with the traveling turn as well.  Here's some of what I considered when trying to choose between them:

How's that Rye Waltz revival working out?

I was fishing around in back issues of the Chicago Tribune (temporarily available online for free in beta test mode) and came across an amusing little report on the twenty-fourth annual normal school of the Chicago Association of Dancing Masters.  On Tuesday, August 10, 1937, the Tribune (then known as the Chicago Daily Tribune) duly noted that in between the lessons, the dancing masters were speculating about the future of ballroom dance:

"While some instructors at the dancing school predicted the return of old-fashioned dances, the demise of the fox trot and the rhumba and even the reappearance of the gavotte and minuet on the dance floor, others disagreed."

Yeah, I'd have disagreed too, even without the benefit of hindsight. 

Unsurprisingly, the teachers were all promoting their own particular favorites; in particular, Clement O. Browne, of Akron, Ohio, "described the grace and beauty of the Rye waltz, an old fashioned dance which originated in the nineties."

Image © 1937 Tribune Publishing Company

Now, the nineteenth-century Rye Waltz, which I described several years ago, certainly had a healthy life into the twentieth century (possibly all the way to the present day) in folk dance circles and as part of deliberate revivals of old-fashioned dance forms.  There was even a hesitation waltz version created in the 1910s, which doesn't seem to have caught on.  But I have a hard time imagining it as part of the modern ballroom dance repertoire.  Happily, the paper provided a delightful photomontage, shown at left (click to enlarge) of Mr. Browne performing the first few steps with Betty Harris of Danville, Illinois.  I'm sorry about the poor quality; I suspect it's a scan of a microfilm of newsprint. 

In classic sequence dance style, the first part travels along the line of dance with a point-close, point-close, "chassee" (slide-close-slide) sequence, followed by repeating all of that against the line of dance, then by a second part consisting entirely of waltzing.  The "chassee" depicted above is, not shall we say, typical style of the 1890s.  It looks more like a lunge; one has to wonder if the reporter or editor mislabeled a photo-friendly dramatic pose as an actual part of the dance. 

I'm fairly certain the Tribune also got the photo caption slightly wrong by stating that the Rye Waltz as a whole "used to be known as the old fashioned waltz".  I'm pretty sure that the dance teacher meant the "chassee" only.  The actual report describes that step properly as a "slide, cut, slide, or just the one, two, three", and goes on to note that it actually is:

"...just the same old waltz step, which every good dancer knows without knowing how he does it, one teacher said.  Or, it was explained, it is the polka step without the hop, or the skip step without much of the skip."

Now that is interesting. 

The "same old waltz step" being described here is actually the valse à deux temps, the two-movement or two-step waltz, which spread across ballrooms in the mid-nineteenth century and, with a slight change of accent and time signature, became wildly popular in the 1890s as the two-step.  That's an interesting choice for the "old waltz step"; my first two guesses would have been the earlier valse à trois temps or the leaping "new waltz" of the later nineteenth century which, tamed significantly, was the close ancestor of today's ballroom waltzes.

It's impossible at this distance in time to tell whether the deux-temps form of waltzing was the dominant style in Chicago (or Akron, or the midwest in general) in the late nineteenth century or whether it was just the one that lingered a little longer and survived into living memory.  Or perhaps the teacher was simply not well-informed about the dances of a previous generation.  (Think quickly: what social dances were popular in 1972?)  At the least, it's a little something to keep in mind when looking at midwestern dance manuals and dance cards from the 1890s onward.