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.
The dance chosen for the scene was the famous Sir Roger de Coverley, best known nowadays as the dance done at Fezziwig's ball in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. That was a great start, since that is a genuine period dance of the era with a lively tune, which was nicely performed for the film by The Irish Film Orchestra. But the fact that it has traditional figures gives the filmmakers less freedom to mess with it. While the "Roger de Coverley" tune was occasionally used for other figures, it was most famously matched to a well-known whole-set dance which was the ancestor of the American Virginia Reel. I have not been able to find a credit for the choreographer, but whoever it was seems to have been aware of this. The dance shown is obviously a modified version of the traditional figures, and some of the tweaks may well have been borrowed from later American versions.
I wrote up a full description of a Regency-era Roger de Coverley several years ago, which may be found here, but I will summarize the pattern of the traditional figures for comparison:
- Partners stand opposite each other, gentlemen on one side and ladies on the other (proper)
- There is no opening whole-set figure
- The leading pairs (first lady/last gentleman, first gentleman/last lady) do a series of figures: forward and back, right hand turn, left hand turn, two-hand turn, dos-à-dos.
- The concluding/progressive whole-set figure has the lead couple weave their way down the set, lead up, and cast off, the rest of the set following from the bottom, ending with the original top couple at the bottom for the dance to restart.
I can't seem to get a short video clip to stay unblocked, even though it ought to be allowable under fair-use, so until I come up with a way to get around that, here are the figures done in Love & Friendship as best I can make them out around the frequent cuts:
- Partners stand opposite each other, ladies and gentlemen alternating sides (proper/improper), as may be seen in the image above
- An opening whole-set figure, which may or may not be repeated, has the facing lines of dancers going forward and back twice
- The diagonal pairs do only right-hand and left-hand turns. Because of the proper/improper arrangement and number of couples, the diagonals are same-sex rather than opposite-sex. The gentlemen turn by elbows instead of hands.
- The concluding whole-set progressive figure has the lead couple galloping down the set and back, then casting off, the rest of the set following from the top, with the lead couple making an arch at the bottom and the other couples going through it, leaving the original top couple at the bottom to restart.
(The movie can be streamed from Amazon here
Despite all these differences, the dance is still quite recognizable. But how bad are the changes? Well, it varies.
I will admit, my first thought was that the filmmaker just decided to use a modern Virginia Reel with the "Roger de Coverley" tune. Here are the concluding figures of the Virginia Reel, circa 1980, as presented in Earl Atkinson's self-published Easy Way to Learn Country & Western Dancing:
Head couple: sashay down.
Head couple: sashay back.
Cast off.
Form an arch and the others go through.
I'm omitting the details of each move, but other than the actors using only one hand each to form the arch, that sequence is precisely what was used in the film. Atkinson's opening figure is likewise familiar: lines go forward and back twice. I'm pretty sure I did something like this in gym class when I was eleven or twelve. Maybe the choreographer did too?
One difference in late twentieth-century versions, as described in Atkinson and by Betty White in her Teen-Age Dance Book (1963), is that the central sequence of figures is done not by pairs of dancers on the diagonals but by all the dancers at once, with their partners. But there have been more accurate portrayals of older forms of the dance on film (either as the Virginia Reel or Sir Roger), and the resources to find out about the diagonal format are easily available.
The alternating proper/improper couples are more mystifying. That's not part of any version of the dance that I've ever seen (all the way to the present day), and it means a lot of same-sex turns rather than opposite-sex ones, which seems an odd thing to deliberately engineer. Austen expert Allison Thompson suggested on a mailing list that perhaps it was done to give Lady Susan a chance to turn with her daughter, thus demonstrating how controlling she (Lady Susan) was, but in watching the scene I just don't see any special emphasis on their interaction. Possibly the choreographer just thought it looked more interesting that way.
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Now, I personally doubt that the choreographer did meticulous research into the nineteenth-century evolution of Sir Roger de Coverley and the Virginia Reel and carefully selected certain changes to make on the grounds that they were only a few decades off. But most of the modifications, taken individually, do actually use legitimate dance elements from the mid-nineteenth century, if not earlier. Let's look at them one by one:
1. The alternating proper/improper couples. In a standard progressive country dance with the dancers starting improper, which is legitimate for England by the late 1810s, this would be how the dance would look by its midpoint. Sir Roger is a whole-set dance rather than a standard progressive country dance, but there are a very few whole-set dances that use the alternating formation. Notably, the Kentucky Reel. Surviving descriptions of it are mid-nineteenth century, but in 1835 Fanny Kemble remarked on its resemblance to Roger de Coverley (in her Journal of a Residence in America), so it seems possible that it may go back a couple of decades further. That still leaves it a few decades and an ocean away from the setting of Love & Friendship, but it's a better-quality reference than something from the 1960s or 1980s.
2. An opening whole-set figure, specifically a forward-and-back. They actually thought of that in nineteenth-century England. In a mid-nineteenth century Sir Roger de Coverley possibly authored by Frances (Mrs. Nicholas) Henderson, an opening figure, not repeated, is added: forward and back, then cross over, forward and back, cross back. That's not quite the same as just a plain forward and back twice, but it's the same general idea. The same sort of figure is also found in earlier whole-set galopades.
3. Skipping some of the pair figures. That same mid-century English version shortens the middle section to include only a forward and back and then a right-hand turn. That's not meaningfully different from using only the right-hand and left-hand turns.
4. The gentlemen doing an elbow turn while the ladies turn by the hand in the normal way. I admit, I can't think of any good reason to differentiate the genders here except some ahistorical homophobia about men taking hands with each other. An elbow turn per se is not recommended practice for this era, but we're talking an informal dance here, so I would let that pass if both genders were doing it.
5. Skipping the weaving figure. That same mid-century version claims that the weaving is "generally omitted".
6. Galloping down the set and back then casting off. This is a very common figure for Austen's era.
7. Forming an arch, and the other couples leading through for the progression. This harks back at least to the mid-nineteenth-century English version of Roger de Coverley and is one of the nineteenth-century variations for the Virginia Reel in America as well.
Once again, I don't think that the choreographer actually thought through all these modifications in this way, but however they were arrived at, they do not stick out as either freakishly futuristic or weirdly antiquated for the era, and the overall feel is good.
I personally think it would have been more visually attractive, along with more accurate, to just do the Regency-era Roger de Coverley figures, but compared to such out-of-period horrors as Hole in the Wall and Mr. Beveridge's Maggot, this mutant Roger de Coverley is really not all that bad.
If you want to see the scene for yourself, for now you'll have to buy or stream the film:
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