Capering & Kickery

May 2016 Gig Calendar

Bashes and balls!  I'll be doing three public social events this month: the Mystery and Benevolence Bash at the American Folk Arts Museum in New York City; the Burning of the Ships Commemoration Ball in Essex, Connecticut; and a weekend of two balls and a workshop at a science fiction convention in Baltimore, Maryland.  In between, the usual classes and a quick trip to Boston for research and Renaissance dance!

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Sunday, May 1st ~ New York City
Regency Dance Workshop (Facebook event)
3:00-5:00pm.  Beginner-friendly workshop, no costume required.

Wednesday, May 4th ~ New York City
Mystery and Benevolence Bash (Facebook event)
7:00-10:00pm.  Benefit for the American Folk Art Museum event.  Informal nineteenth-century dancing, costumes welcome.  Refreshments, parlor games, silhouettes, live music.  Museum exhibit on freemasonry and other fraternal orders.  Advance tickets: $25, available here.

Wednesday, May 11th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Nineteenth-Century Waltz (1 of 5)  (Facebook event)
Beginner-friendly introductory waltz lesson 7:00-8:00pm.  Review for the May 14th ball!

Wednesday, May 11th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Jane Austen Era Dancing (Facebook event)
Beginner-friendly lesson 8:00-9:30pm.  No costume needed.  Review for the May 14th ball!

Saturday, May 14th ~ Essex, Connecticut
1814 Commemoration Ball (Facebook event)
Formal ball with live music, hosted by the Sailing Masters of 1812 in conjunction with the parade and commemoration of the Burning of the Ships in Essex.

Wednesday, May 18th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Social Waltz 101: Country Waltz (1 of 5)  (Facebook event)
Beginner-friendly introductory waltz lesson 7:00-8:00pm.  Take one or the whole series!

Wednesday, May 18th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Nineteenth-Century Waltz (2 of 5)  (Facebook event)
Beginner-friendly introductory waltz lesson 8:00-9:00pm.  Take one or the whole series!

Friday, May 20th ~ Cambridge, Massachusetts (Boston area)
Renaissance Dance for All (Facebook event)
Beginner-friendly social dancing with live music by Renaissonics.  7:30-10:00pm.  No experience needed!

Sunday, May 22nd ~ New York City
The Congress of Vienna Dances! at the Morris-Jumel Mansion (Facebook event)
3:00-6:00pm.  Early nineteenth-century social dancing from a variety of countries in a historical mansion.  Recorded music.  Costumes strongly encouraged!  Limited to thirty people.

Wednesday, May 25th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Social Waltz 101: Country Waltz (2 of 5)  (Facebook event)
Beginner-friendly introductory waltz lesson 7:00-8:00pm.  Take one or the whole series!

Wednesday, May 25th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Nineteenth-Century Waltz (3 of 5)  (Facebook event)
Beginner-friendly introductory waltz lesson 8:00-9:00pm.  Take one or the whole series!

Friday-Monday, May 27th-30th ~ Baltimore, Maryland
Balticon 50  (Facebook event for Balticon)
    Steampunk Victorian Ball (Friday 10pm-1am)
    Balticonga! Dance Workshop (Saturday 7:30-8:30pm)
    Regency Ball (Sunday 11:50am-1:50pm)
    How to Waltz When It's Not Waltz Time (workshop) (Monday 11:00am-12:00pm)
Beginner-friendly social dancing at a literary science fiction convention!  The Steampunk Victorian Ball will be a mashup of nineteenth-century-inspired dances and modern music.  The Regency Ball will go beyond the English country dance to include unusual dances from all across Europe.  Balticonga! takes conga beyond the party line dance and back to its roots as a 1930s ballroom dance.  How to Waltz (etc.) will take the base of modern ballroom waltz and show how to translate the basic step into different time signatures.  All are beginner-friendly, no partner needed.  Creative costume encouraged for the two balls!

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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 York City: May 1, 4, 6-7, 22, 26
New Haven and Middletown, Connecticut: May 2-3, 5, 8-18, 23-24
Boston: May 19-20
Baltimore/D.C.: May 25-31

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

Starting the Waltz, Cellarius Style

Several years ago I wrote about starting the "new waltz" of the late nineteenth century in the way recommended by Allen Dodworth, who suggested a preparatory measure of music in which the dancers move from the usual starting orientation for couple dances, gentleman facing the wall/lady facing the center of the room, to one in which the gentleman's back is to line of dance, making it easier for him to accomplish a clean leap backward on the first step of the waltz, while the lady faces forward and can easily perform her forward leap.  I'd thought at the time to make that post part of a series addressing different ways recommended for starting various forms of waltz over the course of the nineteenth century, but for one reason or another never got back to the topic.

Here's another short installment in what is now a very drawn-out series.

The Rag-Time Crawl

I semi-jokingly call the Rag-Time Crawl "the dance for when I get tired of the Castle Schottische".  It basically fulfills the same function: easy to dance, accessible to beginners, and comforting to people who are not up to leading and following and enjoy the Macarena-like effect of everyone moving all together in the same pattern.

My source for the dance is Frank H. Norman's Complete Dance Instructor (Ottawa, 1914).  The author is J. B. McEwen of Glasgow, Scotland.  I don't know a lot about either of these gentlemen, but I can offer a few bits of trivia:

• There seems to have been considerable back-and-forth between North America and Europe by dancing masters in this era.  Norman's introductory pages note that he was a member, honorary member, or affiliate of dancing organizations in the U.S. and Canada, England, Scotland, and Paris.  

• He had been teaching long enough to include a testimonial from the Countess of Aberdeen (wife of the Governor-General of Canada from 1893-1898) for teaching her children back in 1894, and in 1919, he was the master of ceremonies for a ball in honor of the Prince of Wales in Montréal, as reported in the November, 1919, issue of the Buffalo (New York) dance journal, The Two-Step.

• McEwen published at least one book, The Ball Room Exponent and Guide to Fashionable Dancing (Glasgow, c1902), which I do not have a copy of, and by the 1920s had a dancing school associated with the Norwood Ballroom, as may be seen on The Glasgow Story website.  

• Like Norman, he boasted international connections; he is quoted as listing himself in his book as “the only Teacher of Dancing in Scotland possessing the British, French, and American Badges of Proficiency.”  He turns up in the same November, 1919, issue of The Two-Step in a blurb datelined London, November 5th:

The hesitation waltz is to be the dance of the season in London, in the opinion of J. B. McEwen, dance instructor de luxe, who has just completed his education in the latest dances in Paris and America.  

The hesitation dates back eight or ten years in the States, but McEwen has just discovered it, and he thinks it will be all the rage here in a few weeks.

CD Review: Dancing by the Shore: Victorian Music from Nahant

One of my students asked me at class last night whether he owned all of the dance trio Spare Parts' CDs.  Apparently not, as he was surprised to hear about the ten-year-old Dancing by the Shore: Victorian Music from Nahant.

This album seems to get less attention than their others, perhaps because the music on it cannot be pigeonholed into a single era.  The word "Victorian" in the title is a bit of a stretch; more than a third of the tracks are technically pre-Victorian.

The tunes for Dancing by the Shore were pulled from sheet music in the archives of the Nahant Historical Society, and the recording was originally advertised as for its benefit.  Each piece has some connection to the town of Nahant, Massachusetts, which was a popular island resort in the nineteenth century.  The cover image, at left, is a depiction of the Nahant Hotel in the 1850s.

Spare Parts plays as a trio (of varying components), and they make high-quality, musically-engaging recordings good for both dancing and listening.  That this album is great for the latter is a given.  I will discuss the details of the tracks purely in the context of their usability for historical dancing.

New information on the Regency-era congo!

(For those coming late to the party: this was originally posted on APRIL FIRST.  You may conclude from this that it is an extended joke, not serious dance history!)

It’s always a big moment when brand-new material comes to light and forces dance historians to completely reconsider what had been accepted practice for decades.  While it has not yet been publicly announced, scholars working on the Austen family music books, which were recently released online, are quietly buzzing about the discovery of a one-page manuscript tucked into the back of one of the books.  The manuscript, said to be in Jane Austen’s own hand, contains a scene which was cut from the published version of Pride and Prejudice.

Any previously unknown work by Jane Austen is a wonderful discovery, but this particular one is  especially exciting to me as a dance historian because the newly-discovered scene, which I've obtained a copy of from a connection in England, documents a dance not otherwise mentioned in Austen’s work, one which has been something of a mystery over the years: the congo, or conga, sometimes also found under the name congo minuet.