I recently had the opportunity to watch another teacher do a general introduction to the standard mid-nineteenth century couple dances.  That’s a rarer event than you’d imagine.  Historical dance teachers aren’t that thick on the ground, and even at multi-teacher festivals, either there aren’t any introductory classes or I’m busy teaching my own classes during them.

Watching this class reminded me of something I’ve been meaning to write up for months about altering how we teach this repertoire.  This doesn’t apply to the one-night-stand sort of teaching gig, but I think it’s something other teachers with ongoing classes may find useful.

Quick background: in America, the four most popular couple dances for the mid-nineteenth century were the waltz, polka, galop, and schottische.  I specify America because this does vary somewhat by geography, though this list would be good for England as well, and quite reasonable for France.

The next tier of popular couple dances, judging from my dance card catalog, were the deux temps, redowa, and polka redowa, followed by a slew of others (polka mazurka, Varsouvienne, Cellarius, etc.)

Overall, one would thus think that it would make sense to teach those first four common dances first, followed by the next trio, and then whatever others are locally popular.  But if one steps aside from the popularity metric, does that actually make sense from a purely physical standpoint?

Let’s think about polka.  Specifically, let’s think about polka danced with the full technical steps, (hop) slide-cut-leap, rather than the simplified (hop) slide-close-slide that is so often taught.  My Russian students generally dance polka with the technical footwork, and while that isn’t particularly common in America, I do expect my advanced students to be able to dance it both ways, just in case they should suddenly find themselves in Russia.

When I came back from my first trip to Russia four years ago and told my American students they’d have to know the fancier steps as well as the simplified version, I gave them a rather jet-lagged explanation of what I was asking them to do.  They listened to me in bemused silence — it wasn’t one of my clearer teaching moments — and eventually one of them said “you want us to dance polka redowa in polka time?”  After I finished laughing at the circularity of that description (polka redowa is polka in redowa time), I said “yes, precisely.”  Without further ado, they partnered up and did it, and I said “good,” gave them a brief lecture on why polka redowa was called that, and moved on.

That experience kept niggling at me over the last few years as I’ve changed how I teach various dances, but even while I proceeded merrily on with my little deconstruction projects, I never really thought through what it suggested:

Since polka and polka redowa are just the same dance translated into different time signatures, why teach polka first?

Polka is always taught first, in my experience, because it is one of those four most popular dances.  And if one is only going to teach those four, or only going to teach simplified steps, that’s fine.

But with the technical footwork, polka redowa is easier to do.  Polka redowa is in 3/4 time, rather than the 2/4 of polka.  You thus have three beats of music instead of two for the steps, and a steady “a123” step-rhythm instead of the uneven “a1&2” of the polka.  So if one has an ongoing class and the plan is to eventually teach both polka and polka redowa before they are actually needed on the dance floor…then it makes a lot more sense to teach the steps in the easier rhythm of polka redowa first and then teach polka as a variation, rather than the reverse.

I worked out this theory last winter and immediately realized that I would have trouble testing it.  My own students knew too much to be useful as guinea pigs.  Where would I find a suitable group of people with general nineteenth-century dance skills who did not already know polka and/or polka redowa?

I’m not generally a big believer in the idea that visualizing what you want will make it happen, but I remember thinking wistfully how nice it would be to find a group of Russian dancers (who would be more motivated to learn the technical footwork) who did not already know polka.  Amazingly, within a matter of days one was presented to me for my March teaching trip: the lovely dancers of Voronezh.

To make a long post slightly less long, I tested this teaching method in Voronezh.  I suspect the organizers thought I was a bit mad to spend a huge chunk of time teaching polka redowa when they had asked me to teach polka.  But they went along with it, and my theory proved valid.  Once the dancers had mastered polka redowa, shifting the steps to a new time signature proved to be no big deal.

And thus my students learned polka redowa as well as polka — two dances for the price of one, as it were.  And, just as importantly, they were able to easily shift the step rhythm to match whatever piece of music I played for them and understood the concept that steps could be translated to different rhythms.  Success!

For other teachers who might be interested in using this approach: polka-redowa-then-polka is only useful in very specific situations.  There needs to be enough time to do both dances before needing polka on the ballroom floor combined with a desire to do polka with technical footwork; this makes no sense at all if using the simplified steps.  But if both those circumstances happen to apply, I think this is a rather better approach than starting with polka.

I’d be curious to hear feedback from anyone who tries it.

This post is for Nora, whose circular explanation made it all clear, and for Rostik, who just might have the right situation this year and be game to try this!  (ETAdd: or, well, not.  But who still might find it interesting in general!)