Capering & Kickery

May 2018 Gig Calendar

A light month for me, with the first half of it taken out by Russian holidays and some private travel.  I'll only have a short cross-step course and a final party before I head back to the USA for the summer!

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Tuesdays, May 15, 22 ~ Moscow, Russia
Cross-Step Waltz Mini-Course
19:00-21:00.  Intermediate cross-step waltz; previous experience required.  Mini-course registration packaged with the party on May 29th!

Tuesday, May 29 ~ Moscow, Russia
Waltz Evening/Farewell Party (VKontakte event - Russian)
19:00-22:00.  The end of my teaching year in Moscow!  Come celebrate with an evening of waltz (cross-step and otherwise!)  Included with May mini-course.

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I am available for private lessons in 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.

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The Morrisons, 1863

I came across Margaret Hosmer's novel, The Morrisons: a story of domestic life (1863), in my endless quest for dance references in nineteenth-century fiction.  Almost four hundred pages later, I have a few new citations, the highlight of which is a mention of two women waltzing together, and a growing distaste for storylines that treat dying of consumption (tuberculosis) as a character-building experience.

According to Deidre Johnson's useful website 19th-Century Girls' Series, which catalogues said series and their authors, only basic biographical facts about Hosmer's life are known: she was born Margaret Kerr in 1830, raised in Philadelphia, married Granville Hosmer and had at least one child, bounced back and forth between Philadelphia and California several times, worked in schools, published novels and short fiction for both children and adults, and died in 1897.  The website's full biographical listing for her, from which these details are taken, may be found here.  I am not enough of a fan of her writing to have done any further research on her life.

The Morrisons was Hosmer's first novel.  It is generally listed as having been published in 1863 while she was living in Philadelphia.  I didn't look hard for an 1863 edition; the one I read was from 1864.  An 1868 edition is available online as well.  The setting is vague, both in place and time.  The city where the Morrisons live is somewhere between New York and the South.  Given the author's roots, I suppose it to be Philadelphia; the neighborhood names (West Park, Oak Hill) would make sense for that city.  There is no mention of the Civil War.  Characters visit "the South" without incident and temporarily-hired black servants make brief appearances.  The dresses are not described in detail, other than being bulky enough to make loading the women into carriages a chore.  My best guess is that it is meant to take place in the late 1850s.

The Morrisons are an Irish-American family, a widowed mother with two daughters, a son, and an elderly uncle, all living on the charity of the mother's relatively wealthy niece, Bess Saunders, whom all expect to marry the son and thus solidify their position.  It's a twisted sort of Cinderella story, since the Morrisons themselves are, for the most part, lazy spendthrifts, while the saintly Bess not only supports them (to the point of mortgaging her house and selling her jewelry) but also does all the housework as well.  It's clear from the novel that the Morrisons are not the best of society, but Bess, heiress of her successful father, is wealthy enough that they have servants and need not work for a living.  The uncle has been in business and traveled extensively, but lost most of his money and now lives modestly with his family. 

I suspect that the family being explicitly Irish would have signaled much more strongly to the nineteenth-century reader than it does to me, but the idea that most of the Morrisons are stereotypically charming and somewhat disreputable wastrels comes through pretty clearly.

The Rocker Hesitation Waltz

Montréal dancing master Frank H. Norman was last seen on Kickery when I discussed his description of the Rag-Time Crawl, from his Complete Dance Instructor (Ottawa, 1914).  The Rocker Hesitation, or Rocker Hesitation Waltz, is another easy sequence dance attributed to Norman and taken from the pages of The Two Step, a journal of "Dancing, Acting and Music" that in 1919 was based in Buffalo, New York, and edited by Layton Walker, whose delightful cotillion (German) figures have featured on Kickery several times.  The associate editors were a Who's Who list of American dancing masters with a few international names, including many well-known to dance historians today from their surviving works: F. Leslie Clendenen, Albert W. Newman, Jacob Mahler, Charles d'Albert, George Washington Lopp, Oscar Duryea, and Norman himself.

The Rocker Hesitation was published in Volume XXIX, No. 6, of The Two Step, dated September 1919.  That year, the dancing masters were still struggling with the aftermath of the first World War and the musical and terpsichorean innovations of "jazzification" and the "shimmy" vs. the more respectable waltz, one-step, and foxtrot.  Among the interesting tidbits in the pages of The Two Step that year were that the waltz was coming back at the "slow" tempo of 48 bars (144 beats) per minute, which gives you some idea of how fast they were dancing it before the war! 

In a conveniently self-serving column in the October issue (in which the Rocker Hesitation Waltz instructions were reprinted) Norman stated, while discussing the rebound of dancing after the war, that

...as we are always craving for [sic] something new, England sends us a very pretty and easy new dance, one that will, no doubt, figure on all the programs this season.  It is called the Rocker Hesitation and is an offshoot or a rebound from a dance of somewhat similar name that proved too difficult for the average dancer to master with grace.

He doesn't go into details about the antecedent dance, but a plain "Rocker", attributed to Oscar Duryea, appears on other "latest dances" lists that year and might be the basis for the hesitation version.

It was noted in the November issue that Professor Norman demonstrated the Rocker Hesitation with a Mrs. S. Wyness for the visiting Prince of Wales at the Grand Army Dance on October 30, 1919 (one of two balls the Prince attended that evening) and that the Prince remarked that it was "a dainty and pretty dance."

Maxixe Variations: Flirtation Step

Here's another easy maxixe variation: the Flirtation Step, with the gentleman shadowing the lady and peeking at her alternately from one side to the other.

The Flirtation Step appears most usefully in two sources: G. Hepburn Wilson's How to Dance the Modern Dances (New York, 1914) and in one of a series of flip-books published in 1914 by tobacco company Liggett & Myers to promote its cigarette brands, including Fatima and Sultan.  There was an entire series of ten of these, with figures for the one-step, tango, hesitation waltz, and maxixe.  These flip-books were reprinted in the 1990s, and the reprints can still be found for sale now and then.  

Wilson depicts his dancers with the lady's hands raised, elbows bent, and the gentleman behind her, as shown in the illustration at left (click to enlarge).  He describes the step thus:

As the lady and the gentleman two-step to the left, the gentleman is looking over the lady's left shoulder, and then in continuing the two-step movement to the right, the gentleman looks over the lady's right shoulder.  This step is termed the FLIRTATION STEP.

Maxixe Variations: a dip here, a heel tap there

Here's a quick pair of variations (well, a variation and an ornament) for the maxixe, both pulled from the maxixe descriptions in Albert Newman's Dances of to-day, published in Philadelphia in 1914. 

I don't use Newman as a maxixe source all that often because he really only offers a pair of possible sequences, his own and one from another instructor in his studio.  And he likes his body sway the opposite of the way I do it (toward the leading foot rather than away), so even if I were inclined to do his sequences, I'd be fighting muscle memory to do them in his style.   But even a minor source like Newman provides a few useful flourishes here and there.

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First, an interesting dip or, more accurately, a lunge.  It adds a little spice to the maxixe without any need for turning or changes of arm position.  It is easy to perform, but I would not consider it leadable unless the lady already knows the move.

Giraudet's Galopade

La Galopade is a short, simple sequence dance created by French dancing master, choreographer, and author Eugène Giraudet and preserved in the enormous 55th edition of his dance manual, La danse, la tenue, le maintien, l'hygiène & l'éducation (c1900) as well as in his 1913 Méthode moderne pour bien apprendre la danse.  A matching description appears in George Washington Lopp's La Danse (Paris, 1903). 

In the companion volume to La danse, Traité de la danse (c1900), Giraudet dates the dance to 1889; its earliest appearance may have been on the accompanying sheet music by composer Félix Chaudoir.

The dance itself is consistent across the sources and entirely straightforward to reconstruct.  The dancers start side by side, as shown above (click to enlarge), inside hands held high, gentleman's left hand on his hip (palm out) and lady's right hand holding her gown.  They start on "outside" feet (his left, her right).  Couple follows couple around the room in a line or circle.

Because it moves against line of dance, La Galopade is best done by the room as a whole, rather than as a variation in a normal galop or polka.

La Galopade (16 measures)
2b    Polka forward, side by side
1b    Polka in place, turning half round individually to face against line of dance, changing hands
2b    Polka forward, side by side, against line of dance
1b    Polka in place, turning half round individually and coming together in normal closed hold
2b    One bar of galop and one bar of polka (= four-slide galop); half-turn

6b    Repeat galop/polka (four-slide galop) sequence three more times; one and a half turns
2b    Polka; one complete turn

Open to original position holding inside hands and restart from the beginning.