I return once more, in honor of Valentine's Day, to H. Layton Walker's delightful Twentieth Century Cotillion Figures (Two Step Publishing Company, Buffalo, New York, 1912), which is always guaranteed to provide me some interesting figures for imaginative dancers. Christmas was a bit disappointing, as holiday cotillion themes go. Valentine's Day seems much more promising, since both cotillions and valentines have the goal of matching up people and thus ought to combine nicely!
Starting from the top of an evening's program, Walker does provide a couple of useful suggestions for the grand march. I noted a few years ago that good leaders could get their marching dancers into formations such as the letters of the alphabet, or other geometric figures. Hearts, for example, lend themselves easily to being both created and escaped from by lines of dancers. Walker provided the diagrams at left for what he called a "Heart March Cotillion", though the shape is so basic that one hardly needs the help.
More usefully, he noted that the dancers are left on the wrong side of their partners (men on the right rather than the left) when marching out of the figure. That can be fixed by a standard kludge like having the partners cross each other when they meet, but Walker had a more elegant suggestion: simply repeat the figure going the opposite way up and down the room. I find the symmetry of that appealing, though I also foresee a problem with dancers overthinking things and deciding to change places with their partners anyway, just because they are uneasy at marching in reversed positions.
Your marching dancers will, of course, be improved by silly headgear:
St. Valentine's Figure
For the grand march handsome shiny red plug hats for the ladies and gentlemen are furnished. On the front of the gentlemen's hats are envelopes which contain a heart. This heart bears the name, i.e., Pauline, Henrietta, Augusta, etc. The gentlemen also receive a Cupid's dart named to correspond with those on the hearts as follows. Paul, Henry, August, etc. After the Polonaise with the hats worn by the dancers is over, signal them to form two lines, the ladies to stand on one side and the gentlemen on the other. The latter now throw the darts at the ladies who will pick them up and search the envelopes on the men's hats for the heart that corresponds in with the darts as above described. After partners are found the ladies and gentlemen exchange favors and dance. The ladies will present the dart to the gentleman and he will turn his heart over to the lady.
"Plug hat" seems to mean top hat, or possibly bowler, so let's start with the vision of a column of people clad in shiny red top hats (or bowlers) marching around the room. Fun! The partner-selecting part of the figure then involves some actual skill, since any gentleman who is good at darts can try to aim for the lady of his choice. It strikes me as a bit of a chore for the hostess to prepare, however, unless she has the 1912 equivalent of a book of baby names!
The next one is just a Valentine-themed version of "Pin the Tail on the Donkey":
Valentine Heart
Pin a large heart made of red flannel cloth upon a sheet hung from the door. In the centre of the heart sew a small circle of white. Arrows of white cloth with pins placed therein are given to the guests, each arrow bearing a number corresponding to a list whereon the names and numbers of the guests are placed. The point of this game is to see which person when blindfolded can pin the arrow nearest to the central spot of white. Four favors are offered, one each for the lady and gentleman coming the nearest to the centre, and one for the lady and gent who came the fartherest (sic) away from the bulls-eye.
I don't think this is the smartest figure to choose unless the party is fairly small. A big party will result in either annoying delays if people are blindfolded one by one or a scrum of blindfolded people blundering around bearing sharp pins, which doesn't seem like a good idea. And at the end, only four people get to dance. For a party of twenty people, that's is probably workable. For a party of a hundred, it 's not much of a payoff for all that time and trouble.
This figure would cause similar delays if played exactly as written, one lady at a time, at a large cotillion:
Valentine Fish Pond
A young lady is marched off to an immense tank, made by placing a row of chairs across the end of the room. Over these are thrown rich draperies that are carried on at the same height along the walls, making a fine fish pond, into which the hostess has cast as many pretty valentines a there are ladies present. With fish-hook and line, the discarded young lady fishes out what she considers the prettiest valentine in sight. Once secured, she opens it to read most effusive lines of adoration, signed by one of the gentlemen present. It is then her duty to hunt up the supposed writer of those words and claim him for the next feature on the program.
Walker seems not to have thought all these through, or perhaps not seen as many people who are really bad at amusement park games like fishing for objects with hooks. Assuming there is some solution to the problem of how, exactly, one captures a paper Valentine with a fishhook, the slowness of the process could be addressed for a cotillion of manageable size. Just set up the "pond" before the cotillion starts (a good idea anyway) and let the ladies drift over a few at a time between other figures or during refreshment breaks to fish for their Valentine, which they can then save, unopened. Have the dance for which they are selecting partners late in the program, at which point the ladies can open their Valentines and see whom they get to dance with. It wouldn't even necessarily spoil things if the ladies opened the Valentines early; they could still keep the results secret from the gentlemen.
Walker didn't come up with enough Valentine-themed figures to fill a whole evening, but the above suggestions should provide a starting point for anyone planning a Valentine cotillion for next year. It would be very easy to adapt other figures involving flowers or candy or, really, almost any sort of favors that could be swapped for something Valentine-themed. The Rose Bush figure, for example, has great possibilities...
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