At midnight on January 1, 2008, after a couple of weeks of fussing with a name and site design, I nervously clicked "Post" and officially launched Capering & Kickery with a discussion of how many times one needed to play a country dance to dance in historical style and a plan to slowly write out everything I knew about historical dance.
It's hard to believe it's been ten years.
Back when I started Kickery, I was warned that most individually-written blogs lasted only a year, maybe two at most, before folding. I've personally had a couple of others that have dropped by the wayside, slain by obsolescence or by my own lack of time. And nowadays blogs are quite out of fashion, displaced by social media platforms. But, somehow, Kickery has endured, and from that first short article it has grown a collection of hundreds covering a potpourri of historical dance topics from the sixteenth century to 1970s disco, though with a primary focus on my current interests in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Writing Kickery has changed my life in ways I would never have imagined. Along with improving my writing, motivating my research, and giving me an ever-growing repertoire of teaching material, it's turned into an advertisement for my work and been directly responsible for a variety of dance gigs. It's introduced me to exciting new dance communities and wonderful new friends. It brought me to Russia for the first time in 2011, which triggered a whole series of teaching trips and a fascination with the country that eventually led to my living here part-time. Through Patreon, it's even become a small income stream, which is an enormous boon to a freelance dance historian.
Here's to the next ten years...
Did you/do you design and write the site by yourself? are you going to the Moscow dance week in august?
Posted by: rc | May 16, 2018 at 08:08 PM
Yes, I design and write all of it by myself.
No, I am not going to the Moscow dance week in August unless they invite me to teach.
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | May 17, 2018 at 02:03 AM
I've forgotten..........did i already ask you if you were/are interested in writing/designing a blog page /web-site for me? Or maybe you may know one someone who would be interested in doping this?
Posted by: rc | June 12, 2018 at 07:55 PM
I'm a dance historian, writer, and teacher. I have no skill in website design.
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | June 13, 2018 at 09:32 AM