Capering & Kickery

September 2020 Gig Calendar

Well, I had hoped to be moving back to Russia this month as usual, but it's clearly not to be.  So, online lessons continue.  September is going to be a (relatively) lively month for me, bookended by a lecture and class at a Russia-based festival at the beginning of the month and wrapping up with a pair of USA-based lectures at the end.  In between, my double series of California-based basic country dance footwork classes continues!

Please note: the events listed below are hosted in different cities/countries in different time zones.  Please adjust for your own time zone before planning online attendance!

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Saturday-Sunday, September 5-6th ~ ONLINE / Saint Petersburg-based
Historical Dance Festival Online  (Facebook)  (VK - in Russian)
for Международный фестиваль"Анно Домини"
10:00-18:00 (Moscow time) Saturday / 9:00-19:00 (Moscow time) Sunday.  An online festival of classes and lectures with teachers from Russia, France, England, and the USA!  There will be a total of eighteen hours of classes, lectures, and seminars offered in English (eight hours) and Russian (ten hours) with translation both ways.  Material will range from the 16th century through the 1920s.  I will be offering both a class and a lecture, unrelated to each other.  The class will be on an 1896 American recital solo, "Cachucha", which is based on the famous ballet solo "La Cachucha" performed by Fanny Elssler in 1836.  The class will be in some mixture of English and Russian, with translation as needed, and will be held from 16:00-17:00 Moscow time/9:00-10:00am NYC time on Saturday.  The lecture (in English with Russian translation) will be "Hunt the Squirrel, Chase the Lady!" and will cover two centuries' worth of evolution of this country dance, from early 18th century England to late 19th century America.  This will be from 14:00-15:00 Moscow time/7:00-8:00am NYC time on Sunday.  Please adjust times for your own time zone!  Registration: fifteen Euros or 1000 rubles for the entire weekend.  Tickets: in English and in Russian.

Saturday, September 5th ~ ONLINE / California-based
Low-Impact Historical Footwork 101 (Facebook event)
for the Historical Tea and Dance Society (group Facebook page)
1:00pm-2:30pm.  Class #3 of a four-part series.  Continuing students only.

Saturday, September 5th ~ ONLINE / California-based
Low-Impact Historical Footwork 102b (Facebook event)
for the Historical Tea and Dance Society (group Facebook page)
3:00pm-4:30pm.  Class #3 of a four-part series.  Continuing students only.

Saturday, September 12th ~ ONLINE / California-based
Low-Impact Historical Footwork 101 (Facebook event)
for the Historical Tea and Dance Society (group Facebook page)
1:00pm-2:30pm.  Class #4 of a four-part series.  Continuing students only.

Saturday, September 12th ~ ONLINE / California-based
Low-Impact Historical Footwork 102b (Facebook event)
for the Historical Tea and Dance Society (group Facebook page)
3:00pm-4:30pm.  Class #4 of a four-part series.  Continuing students only.

Sunday, September 13th ~ ONLINE / Connecticut-based
Dance Historian Meetup
11:00am-1:00pm.  Private event.

Saturday, September 26th ~ ONLINE / California-based
Lecture: "Hunt the Squirrel, Chase the Lady!" (Facebook event)
for the Historical Tea and Dance Society (group Facebook page)
2:00-3:30pm (California time).  Zoom lecture.  The lady flees and the man pursues her…and then when she turns to him he runs away!  Is it a dance or the story of courtship?  How did the elegant weaving figures of an early eighteenth century English country dance turn into the simple chases of a late nineteenth-century American contra dance?  Or did they?  The lecture will look at how a single country dance evolves, disappears, and - perhaps - reappears over the course of two centuries and two countries and place it in context with other chasing dances and figures from both Europe and America.  $5.  See the Facebook event for registration link!

 

Wednesday, September 30th ~ ONLINE / Massachusetts-based
Lecture: "A Ragtime Revolution: Vernon and Irene Castle and James Reese Europe"
for LIRA (Learning in Retirement Association - University of Massachusetts, Lowell)
10:00am-12:00pm (Massachusetts time).  Zoom lecture.  For a few brief years in the 1910s, an English vaudeville actor, a New York socialite, and the son of a former slave were some of the most famous entertainers in America.  Join us to explore their intertwined stories, ranging from Harlem to Broadway, from New York to Paris, from World War I’s flying aces to the trenches of France, before this magical historical moment ended in tragedy.  In this lecture, I will trace the parallel careers of James Reese Europe and the Castles, their interracial collaboration, and their influence on the music and dance of the 1910s and onward.

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Coming in October: more California-based basic footwork classes!

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.

The Nahant Quadrilles (4 of 4)

The final post in my series on The Nahant Quadrilles: figure five and some thoughts on the quadrille as a whole!

The original wording:

1^st two cross over give right hand.  And back give left hand.  Form a line.  Balancez.  Half Promenade.  Forward 4.  Half right & left to places

This one should look familiar to anyone who has danced the French quadrille: it's a slightly shortened version of the third figure, La Poule.  This makes it quite easy to reconstruct, but it does present a problem with the music.  The shortened figure is twenty-four bars, while the music has four strains with no indications of any repeat structure.  Conveniently, however, the fourth strain is a transposed and elaborated version of the A strain, so for a twenty-four bar figure one could play A + BCA'x4 or perhaps save the A' strain for the last time through and play A + BCAx3 + BCA'.  The Spare Parts recording ignores the A' strain and just plays A + BCAx4, which works fine for dancing my reconstruction.

This figure really needs no further commentary; it's La Poule minus eight bars done by the lead pair alone, and the reconstruction is completely straightforward:

The Nahant Quadrilles (3 of 4)

And now we come to figure four, the biggest mess in the entire quadrille!  Problems with the figures, problems with the music, problems correlating the two...I believe in my conclusions, but I can't deny that there's a lot of guesswork involved in any reconstruction of this figure.

First, the music.  Take a look at Figure 4's tune, "Georgette", here.  There are three eight bar strains marked with a Da Capo al segno, to which my first response was, what segno?  There is no segno!  There's a Fine, oddly located at the end of the B strain, so presumably it was meant to be Da Capo al Fine.  But quadrille music usually ends on the A strain, and while the length of the figure is the next problem to consider, it's difficult to come up with a reasonable repeat structure that has AB at the end.  In thirty-two bars, A + BCAB repeated, perhaps, but in twenty-four bars, it's just impossible. 

The solution Spare Parts used on the recording was to simply decide the Fine was wrongly placed and should be at the end of the A strain.  Matching Patri's thirty-two bar reconstruction, they played it A + BBCAx4.  While it's hazardous to go purely by instinct, I believe that the A strain feels like it ought to be the ending strain.  You can listen for yourself here, where the audio clip plays A + BBCA BBCA B(fading out).  So I agree with the choice to end on the A strain. 

I am much less certain about the figure length and the four repeats, however.

The Nahant Quadrilles (2 of 4)

Onward we go, with figures two and three of The Nahant Quadrilles!

For figure two, the music (available here) has two strains with a Da Capo, which works without any tweaking.  The Spare Parts recording matches my reconstruction.

The original language for the figures:

Four ladies grand chain.  Forward & back 1^st two.  Back to back.  Repeat 4 times. 

This is a very short figure, only sixteen bars.  The second half is very straightforward: the first pair (first lady and opposite gentleman) go forward and back then perform a dos-à-dos.  As in the first figure, each time through this is a different pair.  

The first half, however, presents an interesting choice.

The Nahant Quadrilles (1 of 4)

At left is the cover of The Nahant Quadrilles, published in Philadelphia in 1836 but named after the resort town of Nahant, located on a peninsula near Boston and seen in the background of the cover image.  For many years, Nahant has been the home of a summer 1860s ball hosted by Nahant resident and Vintage Victorian proprietor Katy Bishop and her late husband Ben.  The Nahant Quadrilles were first worked on for these balls by the Bishops and my own late mentor, Patri Pugliese, in a style befitting the 1860s milieu in which they were used.  Patri was a stickler in his approach to dance reconstruction and dubbed his version a "choreography" because of the degree of adaptation.

I've long had my own reconstruction of this set tucked away, and since the Nahant ball (lately expanded to a full weekend) is canceled due to Covid, this seems an opportune moment to publish it and compare the different approaches.

The original sheet music by John H[ill] Hewitt for The Nahant Quadrilles, with the dance calls, may be found online at the Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection of Johns Hopkins University.  The five tunes were named after women, with the first, "Rebecca", presumably for the cover dedicatee, Miss Rebecca Willson.  It has been recorded by the dance band Spare Parts in a version matching Patri's choreography on their album Dancing by the Shore, which may be purchased here.  That is a bit problematic for my reconstruction, which I will discuss as I work through the figures.