Capering & Kickery

September 2017 Gig Calendar

This is my last month of mostly-hibernation!  As of September 24th, I will once more be taking residency in Moscow (Russia, not Idaho) and doing my teaching primarily there and elsewhere in Europe for eight months, with occasional brief excursions to the USA for special events.    

In the three weeks before I leave, I'll be in Chicago for a ball, the Boston area to DJ blues, and home in Connecticut for an informal Regency dance.  I'll also be in and out of New York City a couple of times.  Catch me if you can!

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Monday, September 11th ~ Oak Park, Illinois (Chicago area)
Country dance ball for Oak Park English Country Dance (Facebook event)
7:00-10:00pm.  Ball to be held in the beautiful historical ballroom of Oak Park's Nineteenth Century Club with fabulous live music by Scottish-Baroque duo Tim MacDonald and Jeremy Ward.  Program will be drawn from the dances of the Lowe brothers, nineteenth-century Scottish dance masters, one of whom was the teacher of Queen Victoria's children.

Tuesday, September 19th ~ Cambridge, Massachusetts (Boston area)
Bluesy Tuesy 6th Anniversary (Facebook event)
7:30-11:00pm (lesson then dancing).  DJing blues for entire evening, 8:30-11:00pm!

Wednesday, September 20th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Autumn Regency Dance Party (Facebook event)
7:00-9:00pm.  Beginner-friendly social dancing.  Historical costume encouraged!

Tuesday, September 26th ~ Moscow, Russia
Course preview for Twentieth Century American Social Dance
20:00-20:30.  Quick introduction to cross-step waltz and 1910s contra dance as part of a larger sampler class (starts at 19:00) for the upcoming series for Studio "Танец весны".  

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I am available for private lessons when in Connecticut or Moscow, 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: September 1-9, 13-18, 20-22
New York City: September 7, 9, 13
Boston area: September 19
Chicago area: September 10-11
Moscow, Russia: September 24-30

CD Review: The Robert E. Lee

The Robert E. Lee (1997) is a neat little album of solo piano played by the famous musician Bob Milne, who is not only a top-notch ragtime pianist, music historian, and "national treasure" who performed at The Library of Congress in 2004, but also has the astonishing ability to "play" multiple tunes at once in his head, meaning that he can do incredible tricks like playing music in 3/4, 4/4, and 5/4 simultaneously.  There's a fascinating article about his abilities at Mlive.com.

The CD title and the famous tune "Waiting for the Robert E. Lee" both refer to the famous steamship which won a race from New Orleans to St. Louis in 1870.

I have had The Robert E. Lee sitting around for over a decade but only ever used one track, "Trouble in Mind", regularly, as an interesting change of style for when I DJ for modern blues dancers.  Until I started teaching ragtime more often than usual this year I hadn't really gone through the rest of the album carefully.  The CD wasn't recorded specifically for dancing, so some of the pieces don't have the regular rhythm one would desire, but about half of them are quite good for dancing, a few others are workable, and the piano playing is invariably a joy to listen to even for the less danceable tunes.

Two Easy Mixer Games, 1912

I recently had a request to teach 1910s-era dance games, so I went digging through early twentieth-century books of cotillion (or "German") figures looking for some easy mixers that could be explained in a few sentences.  I found two that fit the bill in Twentieth Century Cotillion Figures, by H. Layton Walker (Two Step Publishing Company, Buffalo, New York, 1912).  That book is one of my favorite sources for the silliest and most extreme figures, but it has plenty of simpler ones as well.

Neither of these figures require any props or preparation, and they can be taught in moments on the dance floor, a practice actually recommended in the description of the second.

Lopp's Polka Croisée

At least two dances called Polka Croisée appear in French manuals.  One is a rather banal sequence dance that appears to have a German origin (as the Kreuz-Polka) and one is a completely separate dance by American expatriate George Washington Lopp, who spent time as a dancing master in Paris around the turn of the twentieth century.  Lopp's major survey of couple dancing, La Danse (Paris, 1903) is largely a translation of M. B. Gilbert's Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890), which is one of two major sources for the Cross Step Polka (as previously discussed here).  But Lopp's Polka Croisée, while clearly inspired by the version that appeared in Gilbert's book, is distinctive enough to be considered a separate dance. 

The major points of difference are that while the Cross Step Polka that appeared in Gilbert, as well as in the fifth edition of William B. DeGarmo's The Dance of Society (New York, 1892), is a four-bar sequence with the lady and gentleman actually doing completely different steps in the first and third measures, with a standard glide sequence and half-turn in the second and fourth, Lopp's version is a longer, eight-bar, sequence which has the dancers matching footwork and turning only on the fourth and eighth measures.  It maintains its connection to the Glide Polka (a.k.a. Coquette), but the partners perform it in unison.