Capering & Kickery

May 2020 Gig Calendar

As I slowly regain my footing in this new pandemic world, I am beginning to schedule online events of various sorts.  It's not as rewarding as teaching or lecturing in person, but given the worldwide emergency and the extreme risk of in-person dancing right now, it's the best we can do.

Note that the events below are being hosted in different cities (and countries!) in different time zones - please remember to adjust times for your own time zone before planning online attendance!

There will be some updates to the events below and possibly a couple of other events added later in the month; check back mid-month for more information!

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Saturday, May 16th ~ ONLINE / California-based
"5 Things...inside the Dancing Mind of Susan de Guardiola"
for the Historical Tea and Dance Society (group Facebook page)
10:00am-12:00pm (California time).  Online interview (one hour) then post-interview discussion.  Interview hosted on Zoom and Facebook Live; discussion on Zoom.  Preregistration required for Zoom.  Details are posted on Facebook here!  No set price, but donations (Paypal) are requested.

Sunday, May 17th ~ ONLINE / Ukraine-based
Онлайн-пікнік зі Сьюзан де Гуардіола та історії ампірної доби (Facebook event)
Online Regency Picnic and StoryTime with Susan de Guardiola
19:00-21:30 (Kyiv time).  Dress up in Regency costume and take tea with me online!  The first hour will be story time on the theme of "Regency Dancers Behaving Badly" with time for questions.  This will be followed by tea (make your own!) and social time, during which I will take and answer random dance questions as best I can.  Questions submitted in advance via the Facebook event will have the best chance of getting good answers!  Regency costume is admired but not required - other historical or fantastical costume, or simply nice modern clothes are also fine.  Language: English from Susan, translation to Ukrainian/Russian as needed.  No set price, but donations (Paypal) are happily accepted.  Arrangements are being made for Ukrainians to donate by credit/debit card.

Saturday-Sunday, May 23rd-24th ~ ONLINE / Russia-based
Historical Dance Festival Online (Facebook - English)  (VK-Russian)
for Международный фестиваль"Анно Домини"
10:00-18:00 (Moscow time) Saturday / 10:00-19:00 (Moscow time) Sunday.  An online festival of classes and lectures with teachers from Russia, France, England, and the USA!  Material will range from the early 17th century through the 1920s.  I will deliver a lecture/class (Facebook link-English, VK link-Russian)  intended as a pair, though each also stands alone.  The lecture (in English with Russian translation) will be on the ballroom gavottes of the 1910s.  This will be from 18:00-19:00 Moscow time on Saturday.  The class will be on a specific gavotte recital piece which can be danced solo - perfect for quarantined individuals! - though it was also noted as possible for four or eight dancers.  This class will be in some mixture of English and Russian, with translation as needed in both directions, and will be held from 15:00-16:00 Moscow time on Sunday.  Full weekend price: 10 Euros through May 15, then 15 after.

Sunday, May 24th ~ ONLINE / Maryland-based
Balticon 54 (Facebook)
A Zoom-hosted workshop and a DJ'ed dance party!  11:00-11:50am, basic hand jive movements and practice time.  10-11pm (or midnight if interest is high!) DJ'ed blues/slow dance music.  Video optional for both - watch/listen privately or turn on the camera so we can see your moves.  Misbehavior on camera or mic will get you booted!  Free, but pre-registration for each is required.  Open the drop-down menu for Sunday, May 24th, on this page and register for each item individually.

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Coming in June: online classes on dance reconstruction and composing/calling Regency-era country dances!

I am also available for private online lessons via Skype or Zoom (or your videoconferencing software of choice); please email me directly if you would like to schedule a private lesson.

Dance Card: United Six, 1879

And...here's the "United Six" dance card that inspired me to write about "Roy's Wife"!

The back of the card (click to enlarge) gives the printer as "Danvers Mirror Print", a printing company located in Danvers, Massachusetts (formerly Salem Village, of the famous Salem witchcraft trials) in the late nineteenth century.  The date on the front of the card, April 2, 1879, called "Fast Eve" confirms the Massachusetts connection -- in 1879, April third was proclaimed Fast Day, a day of "fasting, humiliation, and prayer" by then-Governor Thomas Talbot.  His original proclamation may be seen at the Boston Atheneum Digital Collections. 

Sadly, there is no further information about the location of the ball on the card, and I have not been inspired to do a lengthy search.  When the card was originally posted on Facebook, it was speculated that the ball was held by six local Masonic Lodges; I have no evidence one way or the other for that.

Fast Days in the young United States could be proclaimed anytime, but a springtime Fast Day was an ongoing tradition in many New England states in the nineteenth century.  The day was officially religious in nature, and at least one Fast Day sermon from 1879, "The Future of New England", by noted minister Edward Everett Hale of the South Congregational Church. was later published and may be read here.

Not everyone's mind was solely focused on religion, however.  The Pilot, a Boston-area Catholic newspaper, reported on March 22nd that the St. Mary's Young Men's Temperance Society, Bunker Hill District, would hold "an interesting exhibition of gymnastics on Fast Day" and on April 12th that members of St. Augustine's Lyceum had held a "Pedestrian Contest", a series of footraces, that day.  In 1894, Massachusetts, perhaps bowing to the inevitable, converted Fast Day into Patriot's Day (April 19th), commemorating several battles -- most famously, those of Lexington and Concord.

The Vienna (La Viennoise)

The Vienna, or La Viennoise, is a late nineteenth century schottische variant which originated in America and traveled to France with the inimitable George Washington Lopp, though it's not clear to me whether it had much (or any) popularity there or, for that matter, in America. 

My first American source for the dance was, unsurprisingly, M. B. Gilbert's Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890), which collected a wide assortment of the couple dances of the 1870s and 1880s.  Gilbert and Lopp (in La Danse, 1903) agreed on how the Vienna was danced.  Going with Gilbert's description, giving the gentleman's steps (lady dances opposite):

The Vienna (four measures of 4/4 schottische music)
(joining right hands with partner, facing the opposite direction)
1b   Slide-cut-leap-hop forward, starting left, raising right to fourth on the hop
1b   Repeat, starting on right foot

1b    Slide left to side (1), close right to left (2), leap back onto left (&), slide right to side (3), close left to right (4)
1b    Repeat, starting on right foot, leaping forward

Lopp mostly agreed, though he had the final repeat also leaping backward, which I believe to have been an editing error, since his instructions are otherwise almost word-for-word from Gilbert, translated into French.

There are...some problems with this.

Two Walker Editions

One of the dull but necessary tasks I do as a dance historian, right up/down there with reading terrible Victorian novels for their dance references, is comparing different editions of the same book to see what changed over time.  Most of these comparisons aren't as exciting as, say, Dance Mad, which underwent enormous changes in less than a year in its second edition.  But they're still useful for very fine-grained dance tracking, particularly in 1914 when things were changing very rapidly and the tango, maxixe, foxtrot, and half and half either originated or were enjoying bursts of popularity.  And that's before even getting to the fad dances like the Lulu Fado, the Ta Tao, and the Furlana.

Comparing two editions of Caroline Walker's The Modern Dances is pretty tame in comparison, since the changes are mostly just in pagination and arrangement of photos, but it's still a useful window into how rapidly things were changing in 1914.

For reference, here are the known editions with their very helpful specific dates:

First - January 27, 1914
Second - February 12,1914
Third - March 20, 1914

That's impressively fast!  The second and third editions were only five weeks apart, but apparently the major change, the addition of the Argentine Tango, was important enough to warrant not just an added section but also renumbering of the illustrations and having a few rephotographed completely to alter the recommended positions.

I own a copy of the second edition, and the third edition is available at the Library of Congress website.  I have never seen a copy of the first edition, so I will be comparing only the second and third.

Table Talk

Here's a 1966 sitting-down dance that is clearly a direct descendant of the late 1950s hand jive: Table Talk, published in a dance manual that was a tie-in to the musical variety television series Hullabaloo.  The series ran from 1965 to early 1966 on American television channel NBC, amassing an impressive lineup of stars as hosts and performances by major musical acts (including The Rolling Stones, Sonny and Cher, and The Supremes). 

An important element of the show was a dance troupe, choreographed by multi-talented actor-director-dancer-choreographer David Winters (among many other things, he originated the role of A-Rab in West Side Story (1957) and was recast in the 1961 film as well) called the Hullabaloo Dancers.  They were a talented group whose alumni included Michael Bennett and Donna McKechnie, choreographer/director and star (Cassie), respectively, of the 1975 Broadway musical, A Chorus Line.  There's a video of the Hullabaloo dancers here.  The video quality is poor, but their skill shines through.  They still have a dedicated Facebook fan page, and a "reconstruction" of Hullabaloo was briefly featured with Leonardo DiCaprio in the 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood - the clip may be seen here.

Unearthing a Moscow dance

(For those reading this after its original posting date: this was posted on APRIL FOOL'S DAY.  You may thereby deduce that it is an extended joke, not serious dance history!)

Over the last few years in Moscow, I've spent a fair amount of time at balls and parties outside the strictly-historical community and had a chance to observe, and occasionally dance, some of the choreographed dances developed during the Soviet era as well as some which were introduced in the 1990s and early 2000s, either by Russian choreographers or by foreign teachers, and adopted into the community culture of young Moscow dancers who mix historical, modern, and traditional dances at their balls.  It would be a fascinating project to try to determine the origins of all these dances, though I don't plan on taking it up myself, since my Russian language skills really aren't up to the task.  

One of the challenges in tracing such dances back very far is that over time they become folk-processed, evolving as they move through communities, until it can be difficult to determine which movements are native to the dance and which have merely accreted over time.  I've become intrigued enough with one dance to make some effort, however.  It appears to have originated in the late 1970s, though I haven't been able to discover the choreographer.  After some multilingual digging, I've been lucky enough to turn up three Soviet-era video recordings of performances outside the USSR which I believe depict the authentic dance, including the different steps and variations for men and women.  Ironically, the best sources appear to be in German, which is true for many nineteenth century dances as well.

I'm going to take a look here specifically at the women's steps, which can be performed solo or with a female partner, with or without a group of men dancing their steps simultaneously.  At some later point I might work on the men's footwork as well.