Twelve years ago, I wrote a brief post explaining how to dance "La Russe", a redowa/mazurka variation I found, like so many others, in M. B. Gilbert's Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) and [George] Washington Lopp's La Danse (Paris, 1903). I remain confident in my reconstruction, but in the intervening years I've discovered the official music for it, which clarifies that it was intended as an independent dance rather than merely a variation, and a bit of background. So it's time to revisit La Russe!
First, I'd suggest going back and reading my original post on La Russe, since I am not going to go back through the details of how to perform it.
The choreographer of La Russe remains unknown, but apparently that was intentional: La Russe was created and promoted by the American Society of Professors of Dancing, which had a policy of not crediting the choreographer(s) for the dances they published as their own. La Russe was established among them by early 1882, as their proceedings record that at their thirty-eight meeting, on April 2, 1882, they voted to publish original music for the dance by George W. Allen and noted that the step would be practiced at their next meeting.
The music was duly received, as recorded in the Society's proceedings from their thirty-ninth meeting on May 1, 1882. The description of the dance was appended, with the information that, exactly as stated by Gilbert, it had been "Introduced May 1, 1882, by the American Society of Professors of Dancing, New York". The description included the information that it was to be danced to "Polka-Mazourka Music".
Happily, Allen's score has survived and may be viewed or downloaded at the Library of Congress website. Below is a brief software-generated snippet of Allen's tune at 144 beats per minute. One can clearly hear the "1&23" rhythm used in the first and third bars of the dance:
The wording of the description is essentially identical to that published by C. H. Rivers in A Full Description of Modern Dances (Brooklyn, 1885), as quoted in my original post. This is unsurprising; while Rivers did not attend either of those meetings, he was a member of the American Society of Professors of Dancing and would have received the proceedings and dance descriptions. It is likewise unsurprising that La Russe was also included, with the same wording, in the "revised and enlarged" fourth edition (1884) of William De Garmo's The Dance of Society. De Garmo was the Secretary of the Society in 1882 and as such would have been responsible for preparing the proceedings and sending out the dance descriptions.
That meeting's proceedings also reported that the members of the Society were being assessed five dollars to cover the expense of publication of five hundred copies of both La Russe and the Saratoga Lanciers. Each member was to receive sixteen copies of each, with a retail price of twenty-five cents for La Russe. In addition, it was proposed that a special meeting for practice in both dances be held on June 21st at the academy of "Mr. Brookes" [Lawrence DeGarmo Brookes, one of the founders of the Society]. The proceedings of that meeting, their fortieth, record that La Russe was practiced.
The proceedings were then silent about La Russe until early 1884. At the fifty-second meeting, on January 14, 1884, it was noted that since it was founded in 1879, the Society had only introduced five dances (plus the revised Saratoga Lanciers), one of which was La Russe. At the sixty-second meeting on December 29, 1884, the availability of the sheet music for La Russe at dealers' rates was announced. Orchestral parts could also be provided.
There is no further mention of La Russe until the seventy-fourth meeting on December 26, 1887, when it was recorded that after adjournment, the members "discussed the merits and demerits of different dances" and resolved that
"The Varsovienne and La Russe, next to the Waltz, should be made features in the dancing classes, under the supervision of our members."
It's not clear that that worked out very well. I don't think I have ever seen La Russe on a dance card, nor were its instructions often published. But there is an intriguing final comment in those proceedings:
The “La Russe,” it will be remembered, about a year after its adoption by our society, underwent manipulation by teachers disinterested in our efforts of correcting abuses and subduing extravagant innovations, and advertised our production “La Russe,” giving it the title “The Yorke.”
I've never had firm documentation of the origin of the York, nor, I am embarrassed to admit, had I ever noticed just how close it is to La Russe. The York is basically a livelier version using hops, cuts, and leaps rather than the simple slides and closes of La Russe. Compare:
La Russe: 1&23 slide-close-slide close 123 slide close slide
York: 1&23 slide-close-slide cut &123 hop-slide cut leap
It is entirely possible that the York was exactly what the dancing masters complained of: a less subdued version of La Russe. But this sheds a new light on The New York Times' September 9, 1885, article describing a meeting of the Society at Brookes' Academy on the previous day, where a Mr. Spink claimed to have invented the dance. There is no mention of the York or this events of this anecdote in the proceedings of that meeting (the sixty-fifth, their eighth annual convention), but the dancing masters did meet at Brookes' Academy on September 8th for "exchange of ideas, social intercourse and practice of dances."
Mr. Spink would have been either Samuel D. Spink or his son Edwin C. Spink, both dancing masters in Providence, Rhode Island and present at that meeting. Should the attribution to one of them be true, it was misleading to the point of dishonest for the Society to attribute the York to "teachers disinterested in our efforts". Not only were both members of the Society, Samuel Spink was its President and Edwin Spink a member of the Executive Committee. S. Asher of Philadelphia, also mentioned in the article, was the Vice-President.
A final note: the existence of officially approved music does not appear to have stopped other composers from creating their own. Among the surviving tunes are dancing master C. A. Carr's, published in Cincinnati in 1883, which may be seen on the Library of Congress website here, and composer Ferdinand Bold's, composed for W. F. Mittmann's Chicago dance academy and published there. Bold's tune for La Russe (his Op. 5) does not seem to be online, but a German edition of his "Glissade" March may be found here, with advertisement of some of his later dance works on the cover. Bold's music was labeled "Mazurka" and under the dance title on the first page of the score is "Polka-Mazurka".
The mentions of La Russe may be found on pages 48, 49, 50, 51, 62, 74, and 103 of the collected proceedings of the American Society of Professors of Dancing. The 1885 dance practice is mentioned on page 78.
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