Capering & Kickery

Dancing in Love & Friendship

After I saw Love & Friendship back in June, I mentioned in my post on the Kentucky Reel that I would talk about the dance scene in more detail once I could get my hands on the DVD and watch it more carefully.  That having finally occurred this month, here are a few thoughts.  

The short version is that while the music is accurate to the era, which is a pleasant change from many other Jane Austen adaptations, and the scene effectively captures the general feel of a small, informal dance of that era, the actual choreography fails in the details.  There are just too many alterations to the traditional choreography to call it truly authentic.  But it's a reasonable effort, much better done than in most Austen films, and many of the modifications are at least nineteenth-century in style, so overall it does not irritate me the way other, more wildly inaccurate, dance scenes do.

A cautionary tale, 1837

The short story "Lyddy!", by Thomas Egerton Wilks, was published in a London journal, The Young Lady's Magazine, in 1837, its first year of publication, the works from which were collected in a single volume published in 1838.  

Though its title is similar to that of other ladies' magazines of the era, The Young Lady's Magazine actually had much loftier ambitions:

...to concentrate every energy in the production, not only of such matter as may amuse the fancy, but at the same time tend to expand the mind, elevate the morals, refine the intellect, and awaken, -- not the morbid sensibilities, too often produced by ill-selected fictions -- but those pure, unhacknied feelings of the youthful heart, which are in themselves a mine of inexhaustible treasures, and which, by their development, shed a halo of enchantment around.
      --- Preface, p. iii

Referring to fashion as "that universal enslaver" which it believe should be "far removed from those pages where the young and guileless are taught to seek for intellectual improvement", the editors declared that even their "light productions" (entertaining fiction)

...may sparkle and be redolent of mirth, but their wit shall never inflict a wound, and their humour shall never be tainted with aught offensive to the chastest delicacy.
        --- Address, p. 2

I don't generally spend a lot of time reading uplifting moral tracts, but I tripped over "Lyddy!" in one of my regular searches for nineteenth-century women's fiction with ballroom scenes.

Tiptoeing through the terminology: an asymmetrical double glide waltz

When I discussed the Double Glide Waltz found in Melvin B. Gilbert's Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) a few years ago, I noted that there were other step sequences also called the Double Glide waltz.  One of those was a strange little sequence that I at first took for a badly-written description of a Metropole-like alternation of draw steps (slide...close) and waltz steps.  But on taking a closer look, it's a bit more complicated than that.  

I've found this particular Double Glide Waltz only the late nineteenth-century American collections Cartier's practical illustrated waltz instructor, ball room guide, and call book (New York, 1882) and Prof. M. J. Koncen's quadrille call book and ball room guide (St. Louis, 1883).  As a waltz variation, it is nice but not a particularly critical part of the repertoire of the period.  I suspect both descriptions were copied from some common source -- another manual, or perhaps a description on some sheet music -- with some modest editorial brushing-up.  What is interesting to me about these two descriptions is how they demonstrate just how much of a muddle dance terminology even relatively recent dance terminology can be, especially in late nineteenth-century compilation manuals like these that collect from a variety of sources and do not have the advantage of hindsight to divine what we nowadays consider to be standard usage.  

On Old Fashioned Dances, 1926

On January 21, 1926, a column unfavorably comparing modern dancing to that of earlier eras was published in the Lewiston Evening Journal, published in Lewiston, Maine.  "On 'Old-Fashioned Dances' " appeared under the column title "Just Talks On Common Themes" and the byline of A. G. S.  The initials are those of  Arthur Gray Staples (1861-1940), a Maine writer who was the editor-in-chief of the Lewiston Evening Journal (later just the Lewiston Journal) from 1919-1940.  "Just Talks On Common Themes" was his daily column.  Staples described these columns many years later in an inscription of one of his books to the Maine State Library:

The only claim for these things is their spontaneity.  They write themselves — “after hours,” chiefly.  In their day and generation many good folk seemed to like some of them and many did not.

A collection of the columns was published in 1919 or 1920 and may now be found online at archive.org.  Later collections were issued in 1921 and 1924, but  a 1926 column was obviously not included in any of them.  Fortunately, it is now online in its original newspaper publication.

What a difference a few years makes!

That the repertoire of popular ballroom dances changed dramatically in the first half of the 1910s is not news, but it's always nice to find this transition neatly illustrated by actual dance programs.  I recently had the opportunity to look at a pair of dance cards for two balls held at St. Lawrence University, a private university in northern New York State.  Separated by three and a half years, late 1911 to mid-1915, the two cards neatly bracket the rapid transition from the fading of the nineteenth-century dances to the new dances of the later ragtime era.  

The first card, the outside of which is shown at left (click to enlarge), is actually made of loose-leaf sheets bound by small rings between metal plates with the arms of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity in relief on the front cover.  The card is small, less than two inches tall.  Inside, the title page proclaims that it is from the thirty-sixth annual ball of the fraternity's Beta Zeta chapter, which took place on December 8, 1911, in the St. Lawrence University Gymnasium.

The program for the ball was typical of the first decade of the twentieth century: a grand march followed by twenty-four dances equally divided between waltz and two-step.  Four possible extras are also listed, also equally divided.  Tunes are given, and while I have not traced them all, some are immediately recognizable: "Alexander's Rag Time Band", "Naughty Marietta", "Il Trovatore", etc.  The grand march tune was the well-known "National Emblem", a 1914 recording of which may be heard here.  

With its dominance by only two dances, this card is very similar to the 1906 and 1910 cards I have previously posted, and I've no new observations to make about this mix of dances.

The second card, shown at right (click to enlarge), is again a set of loose sheets bound with metal rings between hard covers, this time in what appears to be Bakelite.  The arms of St. Lawrence University are at lower right, and there is a red and white cord and tassel.  Once again, the card is tiny, just a couple of inches wide.  The event was the Senior Ball on May 20, 1915.

The program for this event was quite different: a grand march, seven one-steps, seven waltzes, three hesitations, a foxtrot, and two circle two-steps.  Lines for four extras are given, but the dances are not specified.  The grand march tune was once again "National Emblem", and "Il Trovatore" reappeared among the waltzes.  Also notable are "Ballin' the Jack" for the foxtrot and "Cecile" for a hesitation; both tunes are still popular in historical dance communities today.

This is a much more interesting program from both a dancer's and a historian's perspective.  One-step and waltz dominate, with a single foxtrot representing the very latest popular dance.  The split between "waltzes" and "hesitations" suggests that there were slower waltzes along with the high-speed ones necessary to make hesitations work smoothly.  There is no sign of the tango or maxixe; perhaps they were too difficult or too scandalous, or simply not well-known in a small town far removed from the population centers of New York and Boston.  The circle two-steps are likely to have been "Paul Jones" type mixers similar to the Round Two-Step.

Both of these cards were used, and while there is no overlap in the names listed as organizers or written in as partners, it is interesting to speculate that the attendees might have included some of the same students.

The images above of the two dance cards are courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto.