Capering & Kickery

Rethinking the right shoulder in Regency-era dos-à-dos sequences

It's been years since I've written about dos-à-dos sequences for the Regency-era quadrille, but I've been working on new ones on and off for most of that time.  Over the last year I've had more chances to teach them, both to my New York classes and in various cities in Russia, most recently Kirov, where I wedged a spontaneous dos-à-dos lesson into one evening's workshop.

One of the key points in my current "basic dos-à-dos concepts" class involves examining the meaning of the phrase "present the right shoulder", as found in sources like Principes et Notions Élémentaires sur l’Art de la Danse Pour la Ville (Paris, 1811) by J. H. Gourdoux and Elements and Principles of the Art of Dancing, a translation of Gourdoux with some changes and added material published by Victor Guillou in Philadelphia in 1817.  Both texts use the same phrase (highlighted):

Pour remplir ce trait, un cavalier et une dame de vis-à-vis se présenteront l’épaule droite, et s’avançant, ils passeront dos-à-dos, en exécutant les trois chassés comme pour traverser, et rentreront à leur place, faisant le jeté et l’assemblé.  (Gourdoux 1811)

To dance this trait, the opposite lady and gentleman will present their right shoulder to each other, and perform the temps levé and chassé three times as for crossing over; and, turning around each other, they return to their stands doing the jeté and assemblé in the third position.  (Guillou)

I hadn't paid close attention to this phrase when working with basic dos-à-dos sequences long ago, but for the last few years I've been quietly studying more advanced step-sequences, which have given me some new insights.  The "right shoulder" detail should not be ignored. 

Among the People of British Columbia, 1903

Canadian author Frances Elizabeth Herring (1851-1916) was born in England and immigrated to British Columbia in 1874.  In addition to publishing six novels, she was also at various points a teacher and journalist, as well as an active community volunteer and the mother of eight children.  A detailed biography, from which this information is drawn, may be found online at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography website.  A blog devoted to her and her descendants provides some interesting further reading here.  I nicked the photo at left, taken in the 1870s, from one of their posts.  

I'm not wildly interested in Canadian colonial history or Frances Herring herself, but I did come across Herring's second novel, Among the People of British Columbia: Red, White, Yellow, and Brown, published in London in 1903, while digging around for dance references in literature.  The entire novel is available on Google Books.  Herring's novels focused primarily on characters like herself, white women colonists in far western Canada.  While they are loaded with racist stereotypes and language which make for unpleasant reading today, they are still an interesting window into the customs of a British colonial population in the early twentieth century.  

As usual, I'm going to talk only about the dance scenes in this novel.  More specifically, since the dances of Native Americans/First Nations are far outside my area of study, I'm going to focus on how she depicts the dances of the colonists.  As she says in the preface, "The social life speaks for itself, and is as we live it now."  The now in question appears to be around 1900; the novel ends with a marriage performed in the August of that year.  

I can't say much about the plot, because it's pretty thin: Agnes and Phil are in love.  Their marriage and anticipated departure for San Francisco end the book.  Among the People of British Columbia is much less a traditional novel than a collection of vignettes, based in part on Herring's own experiences.  I imagine her books were popular more for this travel-stories aspect than for their dramatic plotting. 

Among the People of British Columbia features two balls, a Caledonian Ball and a Children's Ball, and some informal dancing here and there.  There's not a lot of dance information overall, but there are a few interesting tidbits.

Moving toward more historically accurate Regency dancing

There seems to be a mistaken impression that because setting your own figures is permitted in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century ("Regency") English country dancing, it must be required, and people who want to dance authentically need to stop using their favorite tunes and give up all their favorite figures in favor of learning to make them up on the spot.

That's not actually true.  Assuming you have good reconstructions, which admittedly is a rather large assumption given how many dreadful (in a historical sense) ones are floating around, it's perfectly possible to keep right on doing the same figures to the same tunes forever and be historically correct.  It's boring, and it's not displaying high-level ballroom skills for a dancer of the era (if you can consider "able to choose a different tune now and then" a suitable bar to clear to have "high-level ballroom skills"; it seems like a pretty low bar to me), but not incorrect.

What has to change is not what you do, but how you do it and how you think about it.

Incorrect:  "This dance is called [name].  Its figures are [figures]"

Correct:    "Here are the figures: [figures].  We're going to dance them to the tune [name]."

See what I did there?  You can do exactly the same figures to exactly the same tune.  Just...say it differently.  Think about it differently.  Understand the difference between a tune (music; the thing with a name) and dance figures (a selection from a limited repertoire of "glossary figures" put together in mostly-predictable ways).  

And when you internalize that mindset rather than the modern one, the varied world of historical Regency dancing opens up to you.

Little Carrie's Favorite Galop

"Little Carrie's Favorite Galop" appeared in the music book Howe's Drawing Room Dances, published by Oliver Ditson & Company in 1859 for the Boston musician-caller-publisher-author Elias Howe.  The figures published with the music were intended as a single quadrille figure, which I was asked to reconstruct for a mid-nineteenth century performing group.  The figures themselves are standard ones, but correlating them with the music makes coming up with a definitive reconstruction a bit of a challenge.

Here are the music and figures as they appear in Howe's Drawing Room Dances.  Click the image to enlarge it.

There are two underlying problems in reconstructing the figures to "Little Carrie":

• The figures are laid out ambiguously on the score.
• The five eight-bar figures are not an obvious fit with music of sixteen-bar strains.

To get a workable reconstruction, one can either alter the figures to fit the music better or keep the figures the way they are and suffer poor correlation with the music.  

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Long enough to dance to!

If one is not lucky enough to have musicians available for balls and classes, finding usable recordings of Regency country dances can be a bit of a challenge.  While there are quite a few CDs on the market billed as Regency or Jane Austen-era music, they are often made up mostly of music from other eras.  Even the ones that are actually suitable selections for the time period frequently include only a few country dances.  And it is, alas, very typical for those tunes to be recorded at the lengths used for modern English country dance: three to seven times through the music.  

Since historical country dancing needs the length of the music matched to the length of the set, and the lengths can be quite lengthy, most of these recordings are not very useful without substantial work with music editing software to add a substantial number of repeats.

So I am very happy to note that the UK band Green Ginger, whose album Music for Quadrilles is one of my very favorites for the Regency era, has very considerately offered for online purchase a set of extended-length versions of seven of the country dance tunes from their Grand Waterloo Ball 2015 album, namely:

• "The Waterloo Dance" (12 x 24 Reel)
• "The College Hornpipe" (12 x 32 Hornpipe)
• "Cupid in Armour" (6 x 64 Waltz)
• "Bonaparte in a Knapsack" (12 × 32 Jig)
• "The Oldenburgh Bonnet" (12 × 32 Reel)
• "The Young Widow" (12 × 32 Jig)
• "Lord Dalkeith’s Reel" (12 × 24 Reel)

I'm especially excited that this batch includes "Waterloo", which is a tune I use regularly at balls but for which I have never had a good recording.  Along with "Lord Dalkeith's Reel", it is one of two twenty-four-bar arrangements in this set of tunes.  That length is fairly rare compared to the quantity of recordings made for thirty-two-bar dances.

Six of the seven tracks are twelve times through, which is the proper length for a four-couple set for a triple minor dance or a five-couple set for a duple minor one.  The last is a sixty-four-bar (!) waltz offered six times, which will work for a three-couple set either duple or triple minor.  It could also be thought of as thirty-two bars twelve times or used for a (very lengthy) waltz.

As usual for Green Ginger, the sound is rich and the instrumentation is lovely: fiddles and piano, mercifully free of out-of-period accordions.

The seven tracks are available for individual download only on the page for the Grand Waterloo Ball 2015 album.  They are at the very bottom of the list of download links.  Note that they are not included if you just buy the whole CD (online or otherwise).  You have to purchase them individually and separately.  The CD has only the shorter versions.

I'm hoping that Green Ginger will do long versions of other tunes from their current and future CDs, so I would like to encourage everyone who does Regency-era country dance to purchase these extended tracks for your own use and to demonstrate to the band that it is worth the trouble to make them.

Entering the Yale grapevine

Now that I've described my preferred grapevine, let's talk about how to get it started.

The way I was taught to enter a Yale grapevine was to go through "tango position", a closed position with both partners opened up slightly so they can both move forward, on opposite feet, along line of dance.  At some point, the gentleman twists himself a bit so that he steps more sideways with the left foot and then crosses the right behind to start the grapevine, the lady continuing her tango position walk, which is, in effect, a cross in front as the gentleman's twist puts them into left Yale position.  He then leads her into the side step and back cross as he crosses forward.

I'm sorry, but by my current standards, that is just not elegant enough.  If the gentleman does all the twisting without the lady mirroring him, it feels like the gentleman is twitching peculiarly while the lady strolls along obliviously.  If they both face each other on the side step, the lady ends up going forward/sideways/forward, an annoying back-and-forth.  And it does not even have the virtue of being easy!

With over two decades of one-step practice behind me, here are four options I like better: