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."
The Rocker Hesitation Waltz is quite simple to dance and not difficult to reconstruct, though there was one ambiguity in the original instructions. It's a good dance for beginners; they get to practice turning in waltz in both directions as well as simple hesitations. I don't see it as a "Macarena" sort of group dance with all the couples moving in unison, but rather as a variation that, with care, any couple can dance independently of other couples or insert into their normal hesitation waltz.
The dancers start in normal ballroom hold, the gentleman facing line of dance and the lady with her back to line of dance. The gentleman starts on the right foot and the lady on the left. The instructions below are given for the gentleman; the lady dances opposite.
The Rocker Hesitation (16 measures of waltz)
1b Rock forward onto the right foot
1b Rock back onto the left foot
2b Waltz one natural (right) turn, starting right foot forward
2b Repeat rocking forward and back
(stepping out to Yale position, right hip to right hip)
2b Run four steps forward (right-left-right-left) and hesitate for two counts
(lady swings clockwise to face gentleman, turns slightly toward her)
7b Waltz three and a half reverse (left) turns, starting right foot back
1b Waltz without turning (forward-side-close), starting left foot forward
(end facing line of dance, ready to begin again)
Performance and reconstruction notes
1. Note that since this sequence has five bars of hesitation in the sixteen-bar sequence, it is mildly anti-social. Careful dancers surrounded by other experienced dancers should be able to manage without causing accidents if the floor is not too crowded, since this is a recurring issue in any sort of hesitation waltz, but they need to pay close attention to their location relative to nearby dancers when starting off the sequence.
2. The rocking steps should be done with "a gentle and graceful rocking motion".
3. The waltz is, of course, the "new", or box-step, waltz, with a "step-side-close" pattern rather than the pirouette of the old trois temps.
4. The last eight bars are simply described as "waltz eight times, commencing on right foot backwards". I've added the details of the turn and the final non-turning measure to provide a smooth transition back to the beginning of the sequence. Norman does not actually specify any turning at all on these eight bars, but there needs to be at least a half-turn (one bar) in there to get back to starting position, and I find the idea of seven accompanying bars of non-turning waltz both unlikely and unappealing.
5. The transition from the hesitation into the reverse turning waltz is actually quite graceful; the Yale position run has put the gentleman in a good position to make his first backward step with the right foot on a diagonal toward the center, with the lady stepping diagonally forward to him on her left. This is exactly the start one wants for reverse turns.
6. It would also be possible to complete the full turn at the end, leaving the gentleman's back to line of dance, and repeat the entire sequence with the first waltz turn being a reverse turn and the running steps going backward. I judged this to be more of a modification of the sequence than simply not completing the final turn.
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