Capering & Kickery

July 2016 Gig Calendar

I am mostly on hiatus from teaching this summer, but I will still do my two regular monthly Regency workshops in Middletown, Connecticut, and New York City!  (Edited to add: and a cross-step waltz workshop in New York City!)

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Sunday, July 10th ~ New York City
Regency Dance Workshop  (Facebook event)
2:00-4:00pm.  Beginner-friendly workshop, no costume required.

Wednesday, July 27th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Jane Austen Era Dancing  (Facebook event)
7:00-8:30pm.  Beginner-friendly workshop, no costume required.

Sunday, July 31st ~ New York City
Cross-Step Waltz Variations (Facebook event)
2:00-4:00pm.  Some couple dance experience required.

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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: July 9-10
New Haven and Middletown, Connecticut: July 1-8, 11-31

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

Kentucky Reel

Earlier this month I saw and greatly enjoyed Love and Friendship, the adaptation of Jane Austen's short epistolatory novel Lady Susan.  There's not actually a dance scene in the original story, but they squeezed a brief one into the film.  I'll defer full commentary on the scene until I can get the DVD and watch it a couple more times, but the brief version is that it was an odd and, as far as I know, ahistorical variation of Sir Roger de Coverley in which partners stood alternately proper and improper, resulting in lines that alternated gentlemen and ladies and diagonals that involved two people of the same gender.  You can see it for about a second at 1:26 in the trailer here.  

While I'm waiting for the DVD release, I'll free-associate to another country, era, and dance.  I promise, this does have some connection to Love and Friendship!

The Tempest

The first thing to know about "The Tempest" is that, despite the name, it is not a version of "La Tempête".  The latter is a different dance with different music and a much longer and more exotic pedigree.

"Tempest" is a mid-nineteenth-century American contra dance with a delightfully unusual formation, as shown at left in a (relatively) modern illustration from Ricky Holden's The Contra Dance Book (1956).  The squares represent gentlemen and the circles, ladies.  There are earlier illustrations, but this is the only one I've found that shows the dance in action.

Descriptions of the formation are very clear that the dancers line up couple facing couple, widely spaced, with the frequent suggestion of six to eight couples on each side, though there's no reason beyond the length of dancing time that there can't be more.  

The dance is started off by the two couples at the head of each line peeling inward and going down the middle four abreast, as can be seen in the diagram.  As those two couples progress down the set, each pair of couples reaches the top, waits out once, and then turns into the line of four to begin the dance in turn.  This is the standard early progression style for country dances, as described in detail here.  By the mid-nineteenth century, however, it was not unheard of for multiple couples to start simultaneously in a country dance.  Boston musician-caller-author Elias Howe, whose books are, collectively, one of the major sources for "Tempest", was quite explicit about this.  So it would not be unreasonable to start multiple lines of four simultaneously.  The dance would continue until all couples have had a chance to rise to the top of a set, dance down it, and return to their original places.

Tracking the Mescolanzes

The topic of mescolanzes, four-facing-four country dances, and whether the famous dance La Tempête was the only surviving member of the genre by the mid- to late nineteenth century, came up in an email exchange recently.  Mescolanzes are one of those dance genres for which I have spent years slowly accumulating examples, so I thought I'd talk a little bit about the format and where dances called mescolanzes appeared over the course of the nineteenth century.

I'm going to limit this quick survey to more-or-less anglophone countries -- England, America, Scotland, Canada, and Australia -- since I've not yet collated all the information I have from other countries.  I'm also not going to discuss La Tempête specifically, since that is an enormous topic all on its own.  Here and now, I will only survey dances appearing under the name or classification "mescolanze" and its several (mis)spellings.

Quadrille for Two, 1913

Like the little one-step variations I discussed a year ago, the delightfully misnamed Quadrille for Two is drawn from a series of articles published in the Chicago Daily Tribune by actress-writer-producer Elsie Janis.  "Old Steps Made New" appeared on December 14, 1913, and featured Janis being inspired by old-fashioned dances such as the gavotte, minuet, and quadrille. 

The Quadrille for Two is not actually a quadrille.  It's a little one-step sequence for two dancers, with its supposed quadrille style coming from the inclusion of a quick dos-à-dos and a turn by right elbows, as shown at left.  Janis also gives a version for a group of four couples, but it is done in a longways country dance set, not a quadrille set.

Janis claims that she got the idea for this from an elderly dancer:

I was talking to a sweet old lady of about 60 on the subject of the dances of today.  She was an up to date little lady, and the type, only too rare, who believe that life is nice and every one ought to be allowed to enjoy themselves even to the extent of dancing the new dances.  She suggested to me an idea which I at once proceeded to carry out.  She said she did not see why the young dancers of today did not do some of the old quadrille steps in their dances.  I argued with her that in this day the girls liked one partner at a time and that it took too many to dance a quadrille.  She came right back at me by saying that all the dancers seemed to be seeing who could do the fanciest step and she thought some of the quadrille steps done by two would be attractive.

It might even be true, though it gives something of the same impression of false modesty or blame-shifting as dancing masters who claim as an excuse that their students made them do things.

Twin Sisters (2 of 2)

As I noted in my previous post on Twin Sisters, which should be read before this one, I had no luck finding a tune called "Twin Sisters".  But there are two other names regularly associated with Twin Sisters: Land of Sweet Erin and The Merry Dance.  Searching for those produced some interesting results.

The Traditional Tune Archive states that "Land of Sweet Erin" is an old Irish jig with a variety of different titles, with the name "Land of Sweet Erin" unique to Elias Howe's books.  That is incorrect; the music was printed under that title in A Collection of Country Dances and Cotillions arranged for the pianoforte (Boston: G. Graupner, c1808-1811).  It includes a set of contra dance figures completely different from the Twin Sisters ones.  Per the extremely useful database Dance Figures Index: American Country Dances, 1710-1830 (DFIA index), another set of figures, only slightly different from the Graupner ones, appear under that title in a c1800 manuscript of dance figures.  And the equally useful Early American Secular Music and Its 
European Sources, 1589–1839: An Index (EASMES) gives three New England music manuscript cites for the tune under that name, with the earliest being a 1795 manuscript from Connecticut.

Howe may have picked up both tune and title from the Graupner publication or, since the tune was apparently circulating under that name in New England, gotten them from another fiddler in his youth.  His first publication of "Land of Sweet Erin", with no dance figures attached, seems to have been in a trio of 1843 music instruction books (School for the Flute, School for the Clarionet, and School for the Violin).  It is included in the 1851 reprint of School for the Clarionet, again without figures, and in a music book published by Oliver Ditson & Company, The Home Circle (Boston, 1859) with a different set of contra dance figures.  The same figures reappear under the "Land of Sweet Erin" title (without music) in Schell's Prompting: How to do it (Boston, 1890).  And the tune turns up outside New England as well; in The Welcome Guest (New York, 1863), it is used, as "Land of Sweet Erin", for a quadrille figure.  I have not even tried to trace it under all its other possible names.

It is clear that "Land of Sweet Erin" was not exclusively attached to the Twin Sisters contra figures.  So how did they come to be linked together?  That seems somewhat more likely to have been Howe's doing.

Twin Sisters (1 of 2)

"Country dances are usually known by the name of the music to which the figures are set."
       --Thomas Hillgrove, A complete practical guide to the art of dancing (New York, 1863)

As country (contra) dancing faded from its former domination of the most fashionable ballrooms in favor of quadrilles and couple dances, Hillgrove's statement reflected the transition in progress from the interchangeability of country dance figures and tunes earlier in the century to more fixed pairings of music and dance as the repertoire shrank to a small set.  Many of these survivors would become today's "chestnuts".  

But in this particular case, I think Hillgrove may be incorrect.  I've found no tune called "Twin Sisters", and since the dance has a history under a different name, I would speculate that it acquired its popular title because of its opening figure. in which two ladies take hands and dance together.

Twin Sisters was well-known enough in the mid-nineteenth century to appear on a list of a "portion of the country dances still in vogue" included by name only, without figures, by Lawrence De Garmo Brookes in his Brookes on Modern Dancing (New York, 1867):

HULL'S VICTORY.
DEVIL'S DREAM.
LADIES' TRIUMPH.
HEWITT'S FANCY.
PORTLAND FANCY.
TWIN SISTERS.
CIRCASSIAN CIRCLE.
CAMPTOWN HORNPIPE.
ETC., ETC., ETC.

The figures are not particularly complicated, but its appearance in such a short list makes it worth some attention.

More from Green Ginger!

A few months ago I noted that the UK dance band Green Ginger had begun making extended tracks of some of their country dance tunes so that they would have a repeat structure useful for historical sets and progressions, which require specific numbers of repeats for specific lengths of sets, as described in detail here.  Most notably, six or twelve repeats are useful for three- or four-couple sets.  Seven repeats, which I gather are frequently used for modern-style country dancing, are not useful for much of anything, historically speaking.  

Since I generally teach to recordings and therefore have a bottomless appetite for new music that I do not have to wrestle with music editing software to make useful, I am delighted to discover that they have continued the project, and have recently made some new tracks available.

I do not plan to make a habit of posting every time Green Ginger puts out something new, but I will create a "mothership" post here for their country dance tracks and update it as new music comes out.