Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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Author: Susan de Guardiola

  • October 2025 Gig Calendar

    This was always intended to be an at-home month as I teach my local classes and work on promoting two, count’em, TWO balls which, in a fit of insanity, I scheduled only three weeks apart. Life is now complicated by the ongoing project of restoring my blog on a new platform and developing a website around it. The fact that this post exists is evidence of (slow) progress!

    Keep reading for the list of this month’s classes and ball. A full list of events further into the future may be found on my overall gig calendar.

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  • September 2025 Gig Calendar

    Rescuing all my data from the Typepad shutdown was not what I had been planning to do this month!  I’m going to have to spend a significant chunk of time this month downloading data and teaching myself WordPress so I can bring it all back on a new platform. This is not going to be fun.

    And yes, through all of this website crisis, I will still have to travel and teach.  September is not insanely busy, but if I’d known I’d have to move my entire site this month, I would have planned even fewer events.  I’ll have quick trips to Boston and New York (Long Island) and classes in Connecticut, including a weekly series on basic nightclub two-step!

    As always, events and workshops past the present month may be found on my overall gig calendar.

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  • July 2025 Gig Calendar

    Summer has come in, and my main work now is writing and catching up on my personal life.  I’ll be in and out of New York City, New Jersey, and Boston, for research, rehearsal, dancing, and DJing, but otherwise more-or-less invisible!

    As always, events and workshops past the present month may be found on my overall gig calendar.
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  • April 2025 Gig Calendar

    This month is going to feature some mental whiplash: two classes of fantasy-Regency (meaning, totally bogus from a historical perspective) Bridgerton dance classes, then haring off to England to immerse myself in serious academic dance history at Oxford University!  Plus sneaking in some research time and exciting extra excursions while I'm in the neighborhood…

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  • Revisiting La Russe

    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.

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  • May 2024 Gig Calendar

    I'm going to start off May with a long trip to England to teach and call at a folk festival and then do some research in London, where the British Library is finally semi-functional again after last autumn's cyberattack.  I have a lengthy "shopping list" of sources to look at and a list of museum exhibitions to visit while they are paging them!

    After that, and April's travel insanity, I'm going to spend the rest of the month at home recovering and hopefully catching up on processing and cataloguing my research photos all the way back to February…

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  • April 2024 Gig Calendar

    April is going to be fun!  I'll be heading to Chicago to run dance workshops and a ball for a Regency-themed LARP and an evening of 18th and 19th century French dance, to Massachusetts for the New England Folk Festival (NEFFA), and then down to Staten Island (NYC) for an 1824 Lafayette Ball.  I don't put library days on my schedule, but I'll have time this month at both the New York Public Library and the Newberry.  In between I'll try to keep catching up on cataloguing material from previous library trips!

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  • Brain Fever, 1840

    Ah, sweet October, which I generally devote to discussion of fancy dress and masquerade balls, weird cotillion figures, and similar frivolity!

    I have two words to start off the month in the proper spirit:

    headless quadrille

    Specifically: 

    The first couple is Anne Boleyn and Louis XVI.  They are facing Lady Jane Grey and Marino Faliero (a 14th century Venetian Doge).  Marie Antoinette and Charles I make up the first side couple, facing the Earl of Essex, dancing alone. 

    In case anyone missed the connection, all of these people were beheaded.  

    Themed quadrilles from history or literature were very common at fancy dress balls in the nineteenth century, but this really has got to be the Best Theme Ever.  I just about died laughing when I realized the joke. 

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  • A Louisville Masquerade, 1843

    Here’s a lively account of a jolly and slightly drunken masquerade held in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1843.  This account has a little of everything: costumes, bad puns, a bit about the dances, and the effects of alcohol on the revelers.  It’s too long a report to comment on every bit of it, but the entire thing is transcribed at the bottom of this post.

    The report starts out with a lot of philosophy about the joys of masquerades, but the first really useful bit is that as in A Few Friends, the unmasking is done at supper-time, which was probably around midnight:

    The unmasking at the supper table is often a great source of laughter and surprise, when it discovers the faces of numerous acquaintances who have been playing off their wit and raillery against each other all the evening, under their various disguises. 

    All sorts of people attended masquerades, which is part of what made them scandalous.  In Kentucky, at least, this mixing was not to be feared, though I suspect the upper classes might have differed on this point:

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  • Professor Webster’s Masquerade Party, 1876

    On March 18, 1876, the Morning Herald of Wilmington, Delaware, published a short blurb covering a recent “masquerade party” given by one Professor Webster at the Dancing Academy Hall.  Unusually, the newspaper coverage says nothing about the costumes other than that there were enough of them to “have exhausted a first class costumer’s establishment, and have taxed the ingenuity of an artist.”  Instead, we get an actual dance program, consisting entirely of quadrilles, Lanciers, and glide waltzes, and accompanied by names which might be masquerade costumes, though I’m not certain of that.

    Professor Webster was a long-time Wilmington dancing master – he was still teaching as late as June 4, 1899, when the Sunday Morning Star reported on the closing reception of his current series of dance classes (see about two-thirds of the way down the first column here.)

    Here’s the list of dances, in order.

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Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

Email Susan

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