Capering & Kickery

November 2015 Gig Calendar

The big event for me in November is the Remembrance Day Ball in Gettysburg, which will be followed in quick succession by a Thanksgiving-weekend trip to Baltimore.  Other than that, I have my usual run of waltz and Regency workshops in Middletown and New York and, at last...conga!!!

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Wednesday, November 4th ~ 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 four-class series.  Drop-ins welcome!

Wednesday, November 4th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Social Waltz 101: Country Waltz (Facebook event)
Beginner-oriented lesson 7:00-8:00pm.  Third in a six-class series.  Drop-ins welcome!

Wednesday, November 4th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Social Waltz 102: Cross-Step Waltz (Facebook event)
Beginner-oriented lesson 8:00-9:00pm.  Second in a four-class series.  Drop-ins acceptable, but previous experience or preceding Social Waltz 101: Country Waltz class helpful.

Saturday, November 7th ~ Москва (Moscow) / YouTube
Slide Seminar: "Мечты о России" ("Dreams of Russia") (YouTube video)
Online presentation (voice and slides only) for Научный семинар "История танца" (Scientific Seminar "History of Dance").  Second speaker.  Presentation in Russian, discussion afterward in English.

Wednesday, November 11th ~ 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.  Second in a four-class series.  Drop-ins welcome!

Wednesday, November 11th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Social Waltz 101: Country Waltz (Facebook event)
Beginner-oriented lesson 7:00-8:00pm.  Fourth in a six-class series.  Drop-ins welcome!

Wednesday, November 11th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Social Waltz 102: Cross-Step Waltz (Facebook event)
Beginner-friendly lesson 8:00-9:00pm.  Third in a four-class series.  Drop-ins acceptable, but previous experience or preceding Social Waltz 101: Country Waltz class helpful.

Wednesday, November 18th ~ 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.  Third in a four-class series.  Drop-ins welcome!

Wednesday, November 18th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Social Waltz 101: Country Waltz (Facebook event)
Beginner-oriented lesson 7:00-8:00pm.  Fifth in a six-class series.  Drop-ins welcome!

Wednesday, November 18th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Jane Austen Era Dancing (Facebook event)
Beginner-friendly lesson 8:00-9:30pm.  No costume needed.

Saturday, November 21st ~ Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
Remembrance Day Ball (Facebook community)
Formal Civil War-era ball with live music by the Dodworth Saxhorn Band.  Dinner included.  1860s costume (civilian or military) required.  Reservations needed -- often sells out early!  I am doing Saturday night only this year, but you can also join my colleague Karen Duffy and the Dodworth Saxhorn Band for Friday night's dinner and ball!

Friday, November 27th & Saturday, November 28th ~ Baltimore, Maryland area
Chessiecon 2015 (Facebook event)
This is a science fiction convention, with writer, artist, and musical guests including Seanan McGuire, Ursula Vernon, Heather Dale, Tamora Pierce, and Tom Smith.  I will be teaching a basic country waltz workshop and leading some informal dancing at a costumed Time Travelers' Social on Friday evening plus doing two hours of Renaissance dancing on Saturday afternoon.  You must be a day or weekend member of the convention to attend!

Sunday, November 29th ~ New York City
Regency Dance Workshop (Facebook event)
Beginner-friendly lesson 3:00-5:00pm.  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: November 1-19, 23-25, 30
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania: November 21
Baltimore, Maryland: November 27-28

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Coming in December: Regency workshops and dances in four cities in ten days!

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

Mysteries of the Manitou

I keep saying that I don't think there's much need to memorize all the variations in sources like Melvin Ballou Gilbert's Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) in order to accurately reenact the social dance of late nineteenth-century America. But I keep reconstructing and posting them anyway, since I find there's often something to learn by examining how they're constructed.  The dance published as the "Maniton", which I am fairly sure is a typo for "Manitou",  has two elements that caught my interest: a major change between sources and an unusual use of the "new waltz", the late nineteenth-century version of the box step that I've been thinking and writing about recently.  

First, the name.  In Gilbert, both the index and the title within the text are "Maniton".  As far as I can tell, that just isn't a word.  In the other source for the dance, George Washington Lopp's La Danse (Paris, 1903), much of which is merely a French translation of Gilbert, it is "Maniton" in the text but "Manitou" in the index.  I think the latter is the actual name of the dance and/or its intended music.  Switching "n" for "u" is a typesetting error I've encountered elsewhere.

Charge of the Light Brigade

A year ago I wrote about Battle Confetti, a figure for the "German cotillion", a form of dance party game popular during the nineteenth century.  Other figures mentioned in the 1898 article that spurred that post included the Dewey figure, which I wrote about earlier this year, and Charge of the Light Brigade, which I'll discuss here, a hundred and sixty-one years after the event that inspired it.

I originally noticed two sources for this figure:

• the April, 1898, issue of The Director, a dance magazine edited by Maine dancing master, author, and enthusiastic professional organizer M. B. Gilbert.  Gilbert is best known today as the author of the 1890 tome Round Dancing, but for a few months he also managed to publish The Director.  It didn't last.  I suspect he wrote most of its contents himself.

• the 1899 edition of the Fashionable Quadrille Call Book and Guide to Etiquette by B. Coanacher, an earlier edition of which is online at the Library of Congress.  This edition has a cover proclaiming it Clendenen's Quadrille Book and Guide to Etiquette.

Here's the original language of the figure as it appears in each:

Charge of the Light Brigade
Music: --- Two-Step
--- Couples Up.  Sig.  Each lady select another lady.  Each gentlemen [sic] select another gentleman.  The ladies form a circle in the centre of the room; the gentlemen form a circle outside the ladies.  The gentlemen raise their hands, the ladies stepping back underneath the up-raised hands which should be lowered, forming what is known as the basket.  The basket thus formed should be divided in halves, each half retiring one to the head and the other to the foot of the room.
Sig.  Gentlemen raise their hands, ladies pass from under and rush to the opposite side of the room, taking as partners the gentlemen opposite them.
        -- M. B. Gilbert, editor. The Director, Vol. 1, No. 5., April 1898 (Portland, Maine).

Charge of the Light Brigade
Couples up; signal, each lady selects another lady each gentleman selects another gentleman; the ladies form circle in centre of the room, the gentlemen form circle outside the ladies, the gentlemen raise their hands, the ladies stepping back under the upraised hands which should be lowered, forming what is known as a basket; the basket thus formed should be divided in halves, each half retiring; one to the head and the other to the foot of the room, taking as partners the gentleman opposite them.
        -- B. Coanacher.  Clendenen's Quadrille Book and Guide to Etiquette / Fashionable Quadrille Call Book and Guide to Etiquette (Chicago, 1899)

The Trio

Since I frequently have to deal with an imbalance in numbers between the ladies and the gentlemen at nineteenth century balls, I'm always interested in dances that use a trio formation.  This can be one gentleman with two ladies or vice-versa, though the former is the more common situation.  

This dance, simply called "The Trio", appears in at least two editions of Elias Howe's American dancing master, and ball-room prompter (Boston, 1862 and 1866).  Howe's instructions are a bit vague and neglect to mention the actual timing of the figures, but a little experimentation convinced me that the following reconstruction is workable and fun.  This is an extremely easy dance, good for groups of beginners.  

Book Review: Twirling Jennies

I was recently given a copy of this brand-new book on the social dance history of Lowell, Massachusetts, as a gift, perfectly timed for a spate of long-distance travel.  Twirling Jennies: A History of Social Dance (and other mischief) in the City of Spindles 1820-1920 (Takoma Park, MD: Misenchanted Press, September 2015) was written by dancer-researcher Ruth Evans, with her husband Charles Worsley as co-researcher.  I've met the two of them a few times at balls and festivals; they're beautiful dancers and lovely people.  I'd seen the book's promotional website and was quite excited to get to read it.  

I should note that this was a gift from a family member, who bought it in the normal way, rather than a free review copy.

In general, Twirling Jennies well repaid my anticipation.  It is not a book of dance reconstructions, though there are discussions of steps and figures here and there, or an academic work.  It is popular history with more technical detail than average that puts social dance in context over the course of a century in a specific community.  And it does a splendid job of it.  Evans takes you through the history of Lowell from its founding and effectively places its famous mill girls and other inhabitants into the social and physical settings in which they danced.  Some chapters focus on particular types of dancing while others move outward to discuss the city's ballrooms, trolley parks, and factories and their pertinence to dancing.  A chapter on the city's old dance halls, now (alas!) mostly vanished or converted to other uses, could be used as a guide for an interesting walking tour of Lowell.  

Respect the box step

I've been thinking a lot over the last few years about the underlying skills needed for various forms of social dance.  A critical one is the ability to shift steps between time signatures, as I discussed a couple of months ago.  And one of the best examples of that is what happened with the much-maligned "box step" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

The box step doesn't get a lot of respect among historical dancers in America because it is strongly associated with modern ballroom dance studio practices.  That's unfortunate, because I'm increasingly convinced that its historical incarnation, the "new waltz" (in contrast to the older valse à trois temps with its pirouette), is extremely important to know for anyone studying American social dancing of the 1880s-1910s.  Despite this, it often gets pushed aside in favor of the older style, which is usually taught first and thus becomes the default social waltz in modern reenactment.  That's not wrong, exactly; it's not like the older waltz vanished in favor of the new. But I think that we ought to be spending a lot more time on the new waltz, because it appears to be one of the fundamental building blocks of the social dance of the entire late Victorian/Edwardian/ragtime era.

Let's look at how the box step got used historically:

Kate Crosby's Polka Party

One of my ongoing projects is looking at mentions of dance in nineteenth-century books and periodicals in order to get an idea of what people other than dancing masters thought and wrote about dancing.  "Kate Crosby's Polka Party" appeared in The Anglo American, a Journal of Literature, News, Politics, the Drama, Fine Arts, Etc.,Vol. 3, No. 26, published in New York on October 19th, 1844, at the height of the first burst of polka's popularity.

Let me state first that this story does not describe an actual polka party.  This is a fictional morality tale using a hot dance trend as to draw attention.  Nonetheless, there is very interesting information within about both the polka's popularity in the fall of 1844 and the practicalities of putting on a small working-class ball, which would have to be realistic enough to be unremarkable to the journal's readers.

The Octagon Lancers, Figures 4 & 5

Winding up the Octagon Lancers, here are the last two figures:

The Octagon Lancers, Figures 1-3

Several years ago, I described the Royal Lancers (a.k.a. Horse Guards), one of the ways in which the famous Lancers Quadrille was adapted for a group of sixteen dancers.  I mentioned then that this was only one of several different Lancers adaptations for larger sets.  The Octagon Lancers is another take on the same idea, written about twenty years later by New York dancing master C. H. Rivers and published in his book A Full Description of Modern Dances.  The linked copy is not dated, but there's another copy of the book with a different cover but precisely the same contents which is dated 1885.  Rivers seems to have liked the octagon format; a few years later he created a non-Lancers octagon quadrille.

With the exception of the fourth figure, the Royal Lancers doesn't really take advantage of the larger formation.  The Octagon Lancers does a much better job of this, though its fourth figure is not quite as good.

The formation, in case it was not perfectly clear, is an enlarged square, with two couples on each side, as shown in Rivers' diagram at left.

Unlike the Royal Lancers, which has the "first couples" (and each other matching-numbered couple) as a facing pair, Rivers has the two first couples as neighbors on the side of the set.  He secondarily labels the two couples on each side the left couple and the right couple.  The first and second pairs of couples are considered the head couples, the third and fourth, the side couples.  Corner couples are, for example, the right couple of the first couples and the left couple of the third couples.

The first three figures of the Octagon Lancers are fairly simple adaptations, which I will cover below.  The fourth and fifth figures will get a separate post.

The Octagon Lancers is deliberately choreographed to fit the standard Lancers repeat structure, so any recording of the Lancers can be used.  A good one in mid-nineteenth century style is available on the Spare Parts CD Dancing by the Shore.