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.
The word manitou comes from the Algonquian language family and refers in different Algonquian languages to various types of spirit. But given that the dance is attributed by Gilbert and Lopp to Ralph Warren, of Denver, Colorado, I think the immediate reference is most likely to the town of Manitou, Colorado, about an hour's drive south. It is known today as Manitou Springs, after the hot springs located there, but before 1935 it was just plain Manitou. The town was founded in the early 1870s, but it really took off after a railroad was laid to it in 1881. It became known as the "Saratoga of the West", and as a resort town it probably, like Saratoga, had some dancing going on. A Denver dancing master calling a dance the Manitou would be working along the same lines as those who named the Newport and the Saratoga Lancers.
You can read a bit about the history of the town here.
The other option is that it was named after a particular tune (probably itself named for the town), as were many of the variations in Gilbert. I've found sheet music from the late 1870s for both a "Manitou" and a "Manitou Waltz", but the former is in 6/8 and the latter isn't necessarily the kind of mazurka-styled tune implied by the dance being listed under the mazurka/redowa section of both books.
Whatever the source of the name, the dance can be done to any suitable mazurka/redowa waltz music. Lopp gives a tempo of 144 beats per minute, which is both Gilbert and Lopp's standard speed for mazurka waltzes.
Aside from the name and the music, there are also some problems reconstructing a single dance from the two sources. The Manitou has two parts. In Lopp, three-quarters of the first part is missing. And the second part is completely different in each source.
Taking the problems one by one:
Part One
The first part of the Manitou as described in Gilbert follows the familiar four-bar slide-waltz-slide-waltz pattern of other late-nineteenth-century dances like the Metropole and the York, but it has some interesting changes in the rhythm of the steps. The dancers begin in a normal closed ballroom hold, the gentleman facing the wall and the lady the center of the room. Giving the gentleman's part (the lady dances opposite):
1 Slide left foot sideways along line of dance
2 Close right foot to left
& Slide left foot sideways again, starting a quarter turn clockwise
3 Close right to left, completing the quarter turn (gentleman's back to line of dance)
1 Slide left foot backward along line of dance
& Making another quarter-turn clockwise, step sideways with the right foot along line of dance
2 Close right to left
3 (pause)
The next two bars repeat the above, beginning on the right foot and making the waltz turn in the second bar by stepping right foot forward along line of dance in the standard pattern of the box-like "new waltz" for a total of four bars.
The "sliding" bars (the first and third) of the first part have one of the more unusual of the possible patterns for these bars in 3/4 time (other dances use 1&23 and 1...3, the latter having only one slide and close instead of two). But it is the "waltzing" bars (the second and fourth) that are really exotic, making a "quick-quick-slow" box-step in 3/4 time. I would suggest practicing the box step in that rhythm pattern separately before putting it together with the rest of the dance. It is marvelously well-matched to the accenting of mazurka music.
Lopp described only the first bar above, no more. But since I find it unlikely that he meant the dance to have a one-bar first part, I think this is likely an editing or printing error. Given how different his second part is, his first part might have been equally distinct from Gilbert's version, but we've no way to know.
Part Two
There is nothing difficult about the reconstruction of the second part from Gilbert and Lopp, except that the two have totally different versions of it. The differences cannot be construed as errors or misprints; they're totally different sequences. So I'll give both.
Gilbert
2b Polka redowa (hop-slide, cut, leap) twice, making a complete turn (&123 &123)
2b Two measures of Part One, making a half-turn (12&3 1&23)
4b Repeat all of the above "over elbows", making another turn and a half
Lopp
2b Mazurka step (slide, cut, hop) twice
1b Polka redowa half-turn (slide, cut, leap; no initial hop is needed because the mazurka step provides it)
1b Point right foot to the side in second position and hold
4b Repeat all of the above "over elbows", finishing the full turn
Both of these are perfectly fine second parts, but there is just no way to reconcile them into a single reconstruction. I find Gilbert's more interesting because it incorporates the interesting rhythms and waltz turn of Part One, but for that very reason it may be more confusing to dancers wanting to memorize a sequence. Lopp's Part Two does not suffer from that problem.
Since I cannot be definitive about the one true way to dance the Manitou, I'll leave it to dancers and teachers to choose whether they prefer it in Gilbert's version, which was published first and is more likely to be the original, or Lopp's, published in Paris and thus probably influenced by his time in France.
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.