Capering & Kickery

August 2016 Gig Calendar

I am mostly on hiatus from teaching this summer, but will have a couple of workshops at the end of August.  Stay cool!

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Wednesday, August 24th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Jane Austen Era Dancing  (Facebook event)
7:00-8:30pm.  Beginner-friendly workshop, no costume required.

Sunday, August 28th ~ New York City
Cross-Step Waltz Variations  (Facebook event)
3:00-5:00pm.  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 Haven and Middletown, Connecticut: August 1-13, 18-27, 29-31
New York City: August 17 & 28

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

Roses and Hooples

As an antidote to the enervating heat wave which has descended on New England this week, I'm ending the month as I began it, with ballroom silliness that make Fair Light of Liberty look positively dull.  Here's another pair of cotillion figures, in the dance-party-game sense of cotillion, taken from H. Layton Walker's Twentieth Century Cotillion Figures (Two Step Publishing Company, Buffalo, New York, 1912).  They are both prop-intensive and a little bit, ah, weirder than most.  But what could be better for a summer ball than wholesome outdoor things like roses and hooples?

Despite the complexity of the setups and props, the directions for each figure are relatively straightforward.  I'm providing them word-for-word below with my own commentary interspersed, because these directions just demand it. 

Presenting...Hoople Race and Rose Bush!

One-Step Variations: La Bursco (El Brusco?)

"La Bursco" is a minor variation on the single hesitation in the one-step.  It was described in an undated booklet called Dancing, written by Charles F. Burgess and Virtus R. Scott as part of the King's Booklet series.  This booklet was published by Wehman Bros., though a colophon on the first page gives a copyright and publishing credit to Moses King, Inc.  It was probably published in 1914, as it covered the then-newly-fashionable hesitation waltz and half and half, along with the one-step, tango, and maxixe, but did not include the even newer foxtrot.

The name "La Bursco" is something of a mess.  It is presumably meant to be Spanish, but is not actually a word in that language, and the feminine article with a masculine noun makes no sense.  Spanish was clearly not Burgess and Scott's strong suit, since they managed to misspell rueda as roueda in another variation name.  So I think that this is most likely another error and that bursco is a typo for brusco, meaning brusque, or, in the context of movement, sharp or abrupt.  That seems more-or-less logical for a hesitation in the one-step.  The noun form, el brusco, would literally mean a brusque answer. 

Leaving aside the name, the move described is a single hesitation in which the dancers switch from "tango" position (both walking forward along line of dance) to face-to-face for the duration of the hesitation only.  The sharp switch from forward to facing and back to forward would presumably be the brusco part.  This is a simple way to add an extra fillip of style to the single hesitation I described here.

Journal of a Residence in America, 1835

Finding the mention of dancing a Kentucky Reel in the actress Fanny Kemble's first memoir, Journal of a residence in America (Paris, 1835), inspired me to do a careful reading of the entire book to look for other dance references.  

American dance manuals for the 1820s and 1830s are relatively scarce, and sources like diaries and letters are in any case superior since they describe what was actually done, rather than what dancing masters wanted done.  Kemble's memoir, based on the daily journal she kept during her travels, adds an extra dimension.  As an Englishwoman raised in France, she can comment not only on what she danced in America during her visit but also on how it differed from practices on the other side of the Atlantic.  The Journal covers 1832-1833, and it was published only a few years later, so it is less subject to the vagaries of long-term memory than some of her later memoirs.

Although the Journal is more than three hundred pages in print, reading it turned out to be no chore.  Kemble was an excellent writer, despite using all the typical verbal curlicues of the nineteenth century, and her observations on American society and her experiences as a traveling actress are often keenly interesting.  Her blow-by-blow description of a disastrous death scene in a performance of Romeo and Juliet is one of the funniest theatrical anecdotes I've ever read, and her comments on American politics are still relevant today.  Her observations about the divisions in the nation and the likelihood of war between the north and south were surprisingly prescient.  I highly recommend the Journal as entertaining reading for anyone interested in theatrical history or in American society in the early 1830s.  The entire Journal in one volume is online at the Internet Archive.

Here, however, I am going to concentrate on Kemble's references to dance.

Fair Light of Liberty

In honor of America's Independence Day, a patriotic cotillion figure!

"Fair Light of Liberty" is taken from H. Layton Walker's Twentieth Century Cotillion Figures, published by Two Step Publishing Company in Buffalo, New York, in 1912.  Walker was, by 1912, the editor of a monthly dance journal, The Two Step, started by H. N. Grant in 1890.

Figures like this were usually danced as part of a cotillion (or "German") at the end of a ball or sometimes as an entirely separate event.  This usage of "cotillion" is distinct from the eighteenth-century square dance that was ancestral to the quadrille and modern square dancing.  Cotillion figures often involved a mixer element, props, and some sort of silliness.  "Fair Light of Liberty" has all three!

Here's the original description:

Eight couples up and dance.  At a signal the eight ladies stand at sides of hall at eight different places, that is one at each corner and one between the space from corner to corner.  The leader then gives a lighted candle to each lady which she holds high.  The eight gentlemen partners each select another gentleman and the sixteen men arrange themselves in a ring at center.  The leader has previously numbered the ladies from one to eight and has placed into envelopes two cards of each number and the gentlemen draw.  At a signal they dance around the left, hands joined in a ring, and at another signal run for station indicated on card they have drawn, and the first of the two who are to run to that special corner and blow out light first dances with the fair "light house."  Eight gentlemen are left, they dance with each other.

This follows the general format of such figures: couples dance, split up, play some sort of game, and then dance again in new combinations.  The instructions are a bit light on the practical details, so here's a detailed guide to how I would interpret and apply them: