Capering & Kickery

October 2015 Gig Calendar

I'm home in early October and then back on the road with a vengeance -- three cities in seven days to lecture, teach, research, and DJ!  After that, I'm staying home in Connecticut preparing for our thirteenth annual Regency Assembly, this year with a Parisian theme, and setting up a new set of beginner-level waltz classes in Middletown, Connecticut.  

Towards the end of the month there will also be...conga!  (Edited to add: nope, conga next month!)

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Thursday, October 15th ~ Pittsburgh
Private lecture & workshop at the University of Pittsburgh

Thursday, October 15th ~ Pittsburgh
Regency dance workshop
Beginner-friendly dance 7:15-9:15pm with live music!

Sunday, October 18th ~ New York City
Regency Dance Workshop (Facebook event)
Beginner-friendly lesson 3:00-5:00pm.  No costume needed.  Review class for ball on October 24th!

Tuesday, October 20th ~ Cambridge, Massachusetts (Boston area)
Bluesy Tuesy (Facebook event)
7:30-11:00pm (lesson then dancing).  DJing blues from 9:45-11:00.

Wednesday, October 21st ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Social Waltz 101: Country Waltz (Facebook event)
Beginner-oriented lesson 7:00-8:00pm.  First in a six-class series.  Drop-ins welcome!

Wednesday, October 21st ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Jane Austen Era Dancing (Facebook event)
Beginner-friendly lesson 8:00-9:30pm.  No costume needed.  Review class for ball on October 24th!

Saturday, October 24th ~ New Haven, Connecticut
Un Bal à Paris! / A Ball in Paris! ~ The Thirteenth Annual Regency Assembly (Facebook event)
Formal ball with live music by The Flying Romanos and dances in the French style.  Period costume strongly encouraged.

Wednesday, October 28th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Conga Class Series! (Facebook event)
Lively dance/exercise -- take conga beyond the line dance to moves for solos, couples, and groups!  6:00-7:00pm.  First in a five-class series.  Drop-ins welcome!
(Conga series will start 11/2 instead!)

Wednesday, October 28th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Social Waltz 101: Country Waltz (Facebook event)
Beginner-oriented lesson 7:00-8:00pm.  Second in a six-class series.  Drop-ins welcome!

Wednesday, October 28th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Social Waltz 102: Cross-Step Waltz (Facebook event)
Beginner-friendly lesson 8:00-9:00pm.  First in a four-class series.  Drop-ins acceptable, but previous experience or preceding Social Waltz 101: Country Waltz class helpful.

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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: October 1-13, 19, 22-23, 25-31
New York: October 17-18

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Coming in November: the Remembrance Day Ball in Gettysburg!

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

Trips to Paris

This post is for Allison, Graham, and Alan, who know and care.  

If I expect to get anything done in my life, I cannot spend my time wandering around the net getting irritated by the dance history errors.  But I do pay attention when they arrive by email.  So I noticed when a mailing list query about how best to dance "A Trip to Paris" at a Jane Austen ball appeared in my inbox.  Happily, I was neither the first nor the last list member to jump in with some version of "That dance is from Walsh, from 1711, and does not belong at a Jane Austen ball!"  (Jane Austen lived from 1775-1817, and her dancing days would have started in the early 1790s.)

I did get intrigued by one comment in the ensuing discussion: that the dance had been "republished by Thomas Cahusac in 24 Country Dances for 1794" and therefore might have been danced by Jane Austen.  That's a terrifically specific citation -- hurray! -- but I instantly doubted it, since (1) very few dances or tunes of the earlier style were reprinted that late (young people, then and now, not being particularly into dancing their great-grandparents' dances), and (2) I already knew there were other tunes called "A Trip to Paris" and other dance figures printed with them.  As another list member pointed out, it's a very generic sort of title.

My immediate thought was that the 1794 publication would be a different tune and different figures and that the person who threw that comment in hadn't actually seen Cahusac and was being tripped up by the modern concept that dances and tunes are specific combinations with a unique name.  (Applying modern concepts backward in time is a great way to produce bad history.)  I'd have bet money on it, but it's hard to find anyone who'll bet against me on a dance history question.

Still, me being me, it was worth looking into.  I've been wrong before.  And in the process I made an interesting discovery: we were all wrong!

Come with me on a little research odyssey to see how!

A Group of Waltzers, 1817

One of the better-known dance illustrations from the Regency era is the 1817 "Group of Waltzers", an engraving by Jean Alexandre Allais (1792-1850) published in the February 1, 1817, issue of the ladies' magazine La Belle Assemblée.  At left is a black and white scan (click to enlarge).  A photograph of an uncolored original may be seen in the Digital Collections of the New York Public Library.  

There are also some beautiful individually-colored versions floating around the net, which were probably pulled out of actual issues of the magazine (ouch!)  A very nice one from the collection of author Louise Allen may be seen at the blog Jane Austen's London (scroll down), where it is mistakenly described as a picture of a waltz class, an error I have seen elsewhere as well.  I'm not sure how the "waltz class" idea got started, but let's look at what was actually said in the pages of the magazine about this particular engraving:

The festive season of Christmas ushered in that period when Terpsichore leads her light footed and youthful votaries to the gaily-lighted up dome; and Britain's daughters, unrivalled in accomplishments as in virtue and beauty, tread the mazes of the intricate dance to the sound of the melodious harp, the well-toned violin, and full martial band.  The season for dancing, thus joyfully commenced, is now in its prime, and we have not only presented our fair readers with the most elegant dress for such an occasion, but we have added a group of dancers as an embellishment to our present Number.
       --- from "General Observations on Fashion and Dress", La Belle Assemblée, February 1, 1817, p. 34

Weirdly, that little introduction is actually given after the description of the plate.  Someone wasn't thinking when they did the layouts!  

Un Bal à Paris! / A Ball in Paris! (13th Annual Regency Assembly)

Waterloo is over!  Peace is restored!  And Paris is dancing!

On Saturday, October 24th, 2015, in New Haven, Connecticut we will have a night of Regency-era revelry in the style of post-Napoleonic France!  This will be our thirteenth annual Regency Assembly in New Haven.

Kickery author and dance historian Susan de Guardiola will be calling the dances to the wonderful dance music of The Flying Romanos.  The program  will include quadrille, waltz, and a selection of unusual French dances including Le Grand-Père, Le Rond de Rocha, La Bagdad, La Mont-Ferine, and La Boulangère.  There will also be popular Scottish imports such as Le Moniemusk and Le Contrebanquine!

An afternoon workshop (free with ball registration) will review the dances for the evening.

Regency costume or modern formalwear is strongly encouraged.  Light refreshments will be served.

Registration is limited to 60 people. No partner is required. $30 per person in advance ($20 for ages 13-21; under 13 free with parent).  More at the door!

Please see the Bal à Paris website for more details and to register, and join our event page on Facebook for updates!

A ballroom brawl, 1804

Going beyond simple rudeness in the ballroom, here's a wonderful account of a French-American culture clash turned violent at a ball in New Orleans on January 23, 1804.  Aside from showing what people of that era would fight over and how hair-trigger tempers were in New Orleans in particular at that time, it also usefully documents some ballroom dance practices of the era.  Slowly piecing together such tidbits eventually allows me to draw larger conclusions.

I'm not going to explain the whole background of the Louisiana Purchase, which transferred an enormous swathe of North America from French to American control in 1803, but it is worth noting that the formal transfer of New Orleans itself took place on December 20, 1803, only a month or so before the incident described.  There is a suggestion earlier in the article that feelings were running high among the French in the wake of (perceived?) American disrespect during the replacement of the French flag with the American one.  There had already been a "slight misunderstanding" at a previous assembly on January 6th.  The fight on the 23rd is a small example of the sort of cultural conflicts that would be a problem in New Orleans society for decades afterward.

Tired of the company, 1789

I've recently been reminded by some discussions on a mailing list that there are plenty of people who don't really have much grasp of the social context of dance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century or that a ball could be a much more complicated and socially perilous event than just a bunch of folks getting together and having a nice time dancing.  

Here's an interesting example of rudeness on the dance floor wielded as a social weapon.

One-Step Variations: the Castles' Jump-Kick

Slowly but surely, I'm trying to cover all of the core repertoire of the one-step.  The little jump-kick flourish that Vernon and Irene often dropped into their one-step is not really a critical or even common part of the dance.  I'm not even sure anyone else ever danced it.  But it's fun and distinctive and worth doing regardless.  It's also dead easy!  

I've never found an actual written description of this flourish, or even a name for it; "jump-kick" is just what I call it.  But it's quite visible in the surviving film of the Castles dancing in The Whirl of Life (1915).  There are also two reasonably reliable later sources: newsreel footage of Irene Castle dancing with a different partner (Vernon having died in 1918) at the 1939 World's Fair, and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing in their Castle biopic, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939), for which Irene served as an advisor.

One-Step Variations: Arabesque Turn

A variation for the one-step that is more often seen nowadays in the tango appears in period sources under a few different names: in the second edition of the compilation Dance Mad (St. Louis, 1914), it turns up as the "Castle Turn (Arabesque Turn)", while Troy and Margaret Kinney, in Social Dancing of To-day (New York, 1914) termed it the "Murray Anderson Turn".  Both names were flattering references to noted dancers.  The Castles, of course, were Vernon and Irene, the internationally famous dance couple.  John Murray Anderson, who posed for the photos in the Kinneys' book, was a dancer and dance teacher, and eventually an impresario who started the Greenwich Village Follies, which in 1923 featured a young Martha Graham.  

I don't think either Anderson or the Castles invented the move; it's stolen directly from Argentine tango.  So I'll just leave it at "arabesque turn".