Capering & Kickery

July 2018 Gig Calendar

July is going to be another quiet month for me, holed up at home doing a bunch of unrelated work, writing, research, etc.  I'll make a brief research trip to Boston and do some DJing on the side, and I may be out and about later in the month.

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Tuesday, July 10th ~ Cambridge, Massachusetts (Boston area)
Bluesy Tuesy (Facebook event)
7:30-11:00pm (lesson then dancing).  DJing blues for the second set, 9:45-11:00pm.

Thursday, June 12th ~ Somerville, Massachusetts (Boston area)
Blues Union (Facebook event)
7:30-11:00pm (lessons until 9:30 then dancing).  I'll be DJing blues from 9:30-10:30.

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I am available for private lessons in Connecticut 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: July 1-9, 13-26, 30-31
Boston area: July 10-12

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Giraudet's Pas de Trois

Like La Galopade, this Pas de Trois is a simple sequence dance created by French dancing master and author Eugène Giraudet.  Giraudet was a composer as well; he credits himself for both the dance and the music and on the sheet music calls himself "Auteur, compositeur, et professeur de danse." 

The Pas de Trois is particularly useful, as Giraudet notes, when there is an imbalance of ladies and gentlemen at a ball, since it is danced by sets of three.  Giraudet is not the only one to have thought of this; there are other Pas de Trois choreographies in late nineteenth-century French sources (including Giraudet's own books).  But this is the one Giraudet claims as his own.

Instructions for Giraudet's Pas de Trois appear with the original sheet music as well as in the 55th edition of Giraudet's dance manual, La danse, la tenue, le maintien, l'hygiène & l'éducation (c1900), and his 1913 Méthode moderne pour bien apprendre la danse.  A somewhat different version appears in B. G. Bottallo's Guide du bon danseur (Paris, 1912).  The dance can be dated quite precisely, since the sheet music is specific: September 20, 1894.  Interestingly, in La danse, Giraudet credits the music to "Hamel", which caused me a long delay in writing up this dance while I argued with the Bibliothèque nationale de France over whether the composer had been dead long enough for copyright to expire and for them to provide me with a copy of the sheet music.

Dance Card: Henrietta Club, 1890

I purchased this beautiful dance card while living in Russia and thus didn't get to see its full splendor until I arrived home.  It doesn't add a whole lot to my overall knowledge of late-nineteenth-century American dance, but every little tidbit helps, and the outside art is just gorgeous -- click the image at left to enlarge it for a closer look!

The card is from a ball held at a Pickwick Hall on Thursday, December 11th, 1890, by the Henrietta Club.  No city or state is given, and the USA appears to have been full of Henrietta Clubs in the late nineteenth century, but from the internal evidence, I am fairly certain it is from St. Louis:

First, the music was provided by Steinkuehlers [sic] Orchestra.  In the St. Louis publication Kunkel's Music Review, Volume 15, No. 1, 1892, William Steinkuehler advertises himself as a violin teacher and the leader of Steinkuehler's Orchestra.  His "card" may be seen about halfway down the left-hand column on page 11 of the January, 1892, issue, here. 

Second, there was a Henrietta Club actively holding balls at a Pickwick Hall in St. Louis in the early 1890s, as chronicled by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:  "The Henrietta Club will give an elegant hop at Pickwick Hall in October..." (Thursday, September 24, 1891, p. 3), "The Henrietta Club have a handsome Invitation out for one of their elegant dancing parties to be given at the Pickwick Thursday evening, Nov. 19..." (Sunday, November 1, 1891, p. 10), etc.