Capering & Kickery

January 2016 Gig Calendar

Happy new year!

I'm still wrapping up holiday writing and other projects, so other than a couple of research trips, I'm not on the road much this month.  Most of the calendar involves waltz, waltz, and more waltz, lightly interspersed with Regency classes and blues DJing, with my sole annual Revolutionary War ball as the grand finale!

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Wednesday, January 6th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Social Waltz 101: Country Waltz (1 of 6)  (Facebook event)
Beginner-friendly introductory waltz lesson 7:00-8:00pm.  Take one or the whole series!

Wednesday, January 6th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Jane Austen Era Dancing (Facebook event)
Beginner-friendly lesson 8:00-9:30pm.  No costume needed.

Sunday, January 10th ~ New York City
Regency Dance Workshop (Facebook event)
3:00-5:00pm.  Beginner-friendly workshop, no costume required.

Tuesday, January 12th ~ Cambridge, Massachusetts (Boston area)
Bluesy Tuesy (Facebook event)
7:30-11:00pm (lesson then dancing).  DJing blues from 9:45-11:00.

Thursday, January 14th ~ Somerville, Massachusetts (Boston area)
Blues Union (Facebook event)
7:30-11:00pm (lessons until 9:30 then dancing).  DJing blues from 9:30-10:30.

Wednesday, January 20th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Social Waltz 101: Country Waltz (2 of 6)  (Facebook event)
Beginner-friendly introductory waltz lesson 7:00-8:00pm.  Take one or the whole series!

Wednesday, January 20th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Social Waltz 102: Cross-Step Waltz (1 of 4)  (Facebook event)
Beginner-friendly introductory waltz lesson 8:00-9:00pm.  Take one or the whole series!

Wednesday, January 27th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Social Waltz 101: Country Waltz (3 of 6)  (Facebook event)
Beginner-friendly introductory waltz lesson 7:00-8:00pm.  Take one or the whole series!

Wednesday, January 27th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Social Waltz 102: Cross-Step Waltz (2 of 4)  (Facebook event)
Beginner-friendly introductory waltz lesson 8:00-9:00pm.  Take one or the whole series!

Saturday, January 30th ~ Hartford, Connecticut
The 9th Regiment of Foot's Mid-Winter Ball (Facebook event)
Formal dinner and Revolutionary War Ball with live music by The Reel Thing.  Rev War to Regency costume strongly encouraged.

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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: January 1-7, 18-31
New York City: January 8-10
Boston, Massachusetts: January 12-17

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Coming in February: more dancing at the Morris-Jumel Mansion and off to Russia yet again!

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

Teaching costume, 1898

What female dance teachers in the nineteenth century wore while teaching is something I've had to put some thought into, as now and then I teach at events where I'm expected to be in some sort of period costume.  That's fine for men, but the floor-length dresses of the nineteenth-century are a real problem for a female teacher: no one can see your feet!  And constantly having to lift a skirt up to mid-calf or higher is not very elegant.  Presumably female teachers had the same problems in the nineteenth century; one wonders what Mrs. Henderson wore in the 1840s.  

I was thus quite pleased to actually run across a short 1898 essay on this topic.

In 1897, M. B. Gilbert, most famous for his 1890 tome of dance variations, Round Dancing, started publishing a magazine on dance, which covered both technical and social aspects of the dance world.  In the January, 1898, issue, he published a brief article on what female dance teachers should wear.  

Here's what he had to say (italics), with my opinions and a few images interspersed:

Christmas Hornpipe

After my last experience with hornpipes, it's nice to have a contra recommended for tunes called hornpipes without having to hunt down or worry unduly about the music!  

"Christmas Hornpipe" is the name of the tune in the image below, taken from Elias Howe's Improved Edition of the Musician's Omnibus (Boston, 1861).  Click to enlarge.

Whether to call the figures "Christmas Hornpipe" is a more ambiguous question, since they appear with other tunes as well (more on this below), reused in the same way figures were in the extended Regency era, from at least 1858 through the mid-1890s.

M. B. Gilbert, Amateur Bookseller

I've mentioned late nineteenth century dancing master Melvin Ballou Gilbert (1847-1910) and his various accomplishments many, many times over the past eight years.  He was, among other things:

• a successful teacher of dance in Portland, Maine, as well as in Boston and Cambridge (including at Harvard's Summer School of Physical Education)
• the author-compiler of the important late nineteenth century source Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) and at least two other books
• the choreographer of the Harvard Dip and other dance variants
• the editor and publisher (and probably primary writer) of The Director, a dance magazine which ran for ten issues in 1897-1898
• sometime president of the American Society of Professors of Dancing

But one thing I have never seen mentioned him is that he apparently also ran a mail-order dance book business out of his home.  Several issues of The Director contain the advertisement above (click to enlarge) in which Gilbert offers not only his own book on dance, but five other recent works as well:

All of these books have survived the last 117 years; I have either a physical or a digital copy of each.  More usefully, at least one edition of each is easily available online for researchers or interested dancers, five of them at invaluable collection of historical dance manuals at the Library of Congress.  Want to see what Gilbert thought was worth offering for sale to the readers of a dance magazine?  Here's a list with links:

• A History of Dancing from the Earliest Ages to our Own Times, from the French of Gaston Vuillier.  (London, 1898).  This book is available at archive.org.
  
  
• Dancing, by Mrs. Lily Grove, F. R. G. S., and other writers (London, 1895).  This book is available on Google Books.
  
  
• Round Dancing by M. B. Gilbert (Portland, Maine, 1890).  Gilbert's major work, also at the American Memory Collection here.
  
  
• The Dance of Society by William De Garmo (New York, at least five editions 1875-1892)  The 1875 edition is also at the American Memory Collection here, though Gilbert quite likely was selling the 1892 fifth edition.  The changes between the first and fifth editions are substantial: the fifth adds a second jig figure under the “variety” (promiscuous) quadrille figures, the New Esmeralda, three new methods of dancing the valse à trois temps, a lengthy set of dances added for the third (1879) and fourth (1884) editions (the Norwegian Lancers, Redowa-Glissade, Polka-Bohemian, National Guard Quadrille, Lawn Tennis Quadrille, Saratoga Lancers, La Russe, Society Quadrille, Waltz Quadrille, and Double Lancers, plus notes on the Theory of Dancing, Dance Tempo, and Additional Quadrille Steps) and another large group added for the fifth edition (the Centennial Lancers, Polo Quadrille, Court Quadrille, Five-Step Waltzes Nos. 1-3, La Rêve, La Esmeralda (New Style), Cross-Step Polka, Portland, Berlin, Rutcher Waltz, La Caprice, Les Patineurs, Double Glide Waltz, Newport, York Nos. 1 and 2, Run, Highland Schottische, Military Schottische, De Garmo, Bon Ton Gavotte, Bon Ton, Oxford Minuet, and some notes on Dance Music, plus music for the Rutcher Waltz and the Quadrille.)
  
  
• The Art of Dancing by Judson Sause (Chicago, at least six editions 1879-1895).  The fifth edition (1889) is also at the American Memory Collection here, though Gilbert was likely offering the latest (sixth) edition from 1895. The changes in this book are much smaller.  Along with some minor layout changes, the sixth edition deletes Waltz-Hop, Waltz-Five-Step, Deux Temps, Danish Dance, and The Bohemian, replacing them with The Brunswick, Two-Step, and Washington Two-Step.  The text of the Deux Temps (5th) and the Two-Step (6th) are identical in considering both dances just variants of the galop danced in different time signatures (3/4 for the deux temps and 6/8 for the two-step).
  
  
• The German by Two Amateur Leaders (Chicago, 1879).  Also at the American Memory Collection here.

It's actually a pretty good list.  Two general histories (with rather dubious scholarship by today's standards), three how-to manuals by major writers covering both couple (round) dancing and some set dancing (primarily quadrilles) and cotillion figures, and one book specifically on running the all-important Germans, a.k.a. cotillions, which by the end of the nineteenth-century were a major form of dance event on their own as well as something to do at the tail end of a ball.

Anyone wanting an overview of popular dances and dance history in America at the very end of the nineteenth century could do much worse than to read through Gilbert's selections.

Same-Gender Couples in the Regency Ballroom

One of the critical elements of serious dance history is cross-checking what the dancing masters says in dance manuals against the evidence we have -- if any -- of what people actually did.  Those two things aren't always the same.  Dancing masters generally explain what people ought to be doing, sometimes interspersed with lengthy complaints about what people are doing instead.  Both rules and complaints are useful guides, depending on whether one wants to strive to dance well and politely by period standards, or dance badly and rudely, as no doubt happened plenty in practice.  

But the very best evidence comes from the letters and diaries of people who actually lived in the relevant era.  Here's a great example of how a letter supports something that dancing masters wrote about in the Regency era: people of the same gender dancing together.

A Ballroom Repentance, 1882

Annie Edwardes' two-volume novel, A Ballroom Repentance (London: Richard Bentley & Sons. 1882), was apparently a somewhat racy novel by Victorian standards.  By today's, it falls into that dreary research category of deservedly-obscure novels that I plow through for the dance scenes.

Edwardes (c1830-1896) was an English author successful enough to publish twenty-one novels between 1858 and 1899, the last published posthumously.  Three were adapted for theatre.  I haven't read any of her other books, but the title of this one attracted me, since it promised a ballroom scene which might have include some useful tidbits of dance information.  The ballroom scene comes very near the end, but to be thorough, I read all seven hundred or so pages of what it would be fair to call Victorian soap opera.  It's a quick read with fewer words per page than a modern novel, so that wasn't quite as tedious as it sounds, but I can see why Edwardes has not come down to us as a major writer.  

A pithy contemporary review:

There is not much to be said of a Ball-Room Repentance; indeed, it would be almost enough to say that it is written in the present tense. When that monstrosity was committed because authors knew no better there was some excuse for it; but now that they have had fair warning, the repetition is simply contumacious. A Lake Leman boardinghouse, an American grass widow, a vulgar family of Continent haunters, a refined ditto, a weak-minded young Oxonian, an older person who is deluded by a brazen married woman with a conniving husband, Monte Carlo, Rome, &c, &c. —these are the well-worn ingredients of the book. That they are not mixed up without a certain cleverness is as much as saying that Mrs. Edwardes is the author; but the book makes us deplore more than ever that a narrative faculty so considerable should not have been able to associate with itself better taste, fresher materials, and more conscientious workmanship. There are touches, too, of occasional grandiloquence in this book with which Mrs. Edwardes has not always been chargeable. Here is a wonderful specimen: "The process of degeneration makes itself visible by no outward or visible sign in Roger Tryan. The poppy retains its surface-whiteness, the man approaches our ruined cousins the Ascidians by steps as yet imperceptible." Mrs. Edwardes might have abstained from reminding us so soon after Mr. Darwin's death of the sufferings which a great man sometimes unwittingly brings upon humanity by making persons who are not great talk nonsense.
                -- Saintsbury, George. “New Novels.” The Academy 532 (1882): 44.