Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian
Coming back to cotillion figures, and sliding even further down the weirdness scale, here’s a figure that combines playing doctor and still more wacky costumes! The source, once again, is the ever-delightful Twentieth Century Cotillion Figures by H. Layton Walker (Two Step Publishing Company, Buffalo, New York, 1912).
Like the Garden Figure and Stocking Auction figures, Sanitarium is a partner-choosing mixer, but with a much more elaborate setup. Here’s Walker’s description:
A lengthy, lively description of a masquerade in Heidelberg may be found in Meister Karl’s Sketch-book, by the American humorist, journalist, and folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland, who described the book in his Memoirs as
…an odd mélange, which had appeared in chapters in the Knickerbocker Magazine. It was titled Meister Karl’s Sketch-Book. It had no great success beyond attaining to a second edition long after; yet Washington Irving praised it to everybody, and wrote to me that he liked it so much that he kept it by him to nibble ever and anon, like a Stilton cheese or a paté de foie gras; and here and there I have known men, like the late Nicolas Trübner or E. L. Bulwer, who found a strange attraction in it, but it was emphatically caviare to the general reader. It had at least a style of its own, which found a few imitators. It ranks, I think, about pari passu with Coryatt’s “Crudities,” or lower. (p. 206)
The Sketch-Book (1855) was a fictionalized travel journal based on Leland’s experiences studying and traveling in Europe as a young man. In the preface, he explained that it had been written primarily between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, which would have been from 1840 to 1849. Leland spent three years during this period studying in Heidelberg, Munich, and Paris. He mentioned the various masked balls in Heidelberg in his Memoirs:
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Moving on from fancy dress balls, here are a pair of cotillion figures which actually involve some degree of costuming, at least for loose definitions of the concept. Both figures are taken from H. Layton Walker’s Twentieth Century Cotillion Figures (Two Step Publishing Company, Buffalo, New York, 1912), source of an endless supply of delightfully weird figures. There are actually Halloween-themed figures in Walker’s book, but they’re quite dull by comparison with these two!
Both figures are simple mixers, with either the ladies or the gentlemen selecting partners from a group of opposite-sex dancers. Dozens of figures of this sort were published over the years, but these two take the concept to a whole new level by having the dancers put on some sort of silly costume during the ball itself, presumably right over their normal evening dress.
The final fancy dress of the Newport summer season of 1850 occurred on Wednesday, September 4th. It was covered by The Boston Herald on September 5th (“Grand Fancy Ball at Newport”, p. 4) and more extensively by The New York Herald on September 6th (“The Grand Fancy Dress Ball at Newport”, p. 1). The bulk of the coverage was devoted to lists of attendees and their costumes, as is typical for fancy dress balls, but there are some other tidbits of useful information as well. The New York Herald article is extremely lengthy, so I have not transcribed all of it. The article from The Boston Herald is quite short, but not nearly as interesting.
The ball was held at the rebuilt Ocean House, the original of which had opened in 1844, burned down, and been rebuilt. This Ocean House was not the same as the modern Ocean House in Newport. A different hotel by the same name opened in 1868, was demolished in 2005, and then rebuilt again in 2010.
At the RhodeTour website, Dr. Brian Knoth writes about the first two Ocean Houses, with specific mention of the 1850 Fancy Dress Ball:
The short story “Lyddy!”, by Thomas Egerton Wilks, was published in a London journal, The Young Lady’s Magazine, in 1837, its first year of publication, the works from which were collected in a single volume published in 1838.
Though its title is similar to that of other ladies’ magazines of the era, The Young Lady’s Magazine actually had much loftier ambitions:
…to concentrate every energy in the production, not only of such matter as may amuse the fancy, but at the same time tend to expand the mind, elevate the morals, refine the intellect, and awaken, — not the morbid sensibilities, too often produced by ill-selected fictions — but those pure, unhacknied feelings of the youthful heart, which are in themselves a mine of inexhaustible treasures, and which, by their development, shed a halo of enchantment around.
— Preface, p. iii
On January 21, 1926, a column unfavorably comparing modern dancing to that of earlier eras was published in the Lewiston Evening Journal, published in Lewiston, Maine. “On ‘Old-Fashioned Dances’ ” appeared under the column title “Just Talks On Common Themes” and the byline of A. G. S. The initials are those of Arthur Gray Staples (1861-1940), a Maine writer who was the editor-in-chief of the Lewiston Evening Journal (later just the Lewiston Journal) from 1919-1940. “Just Talks On Common Themes” was his daily column. Staples described these columns many years later in an inscription of one of his books to the Maine State Library:
The only claim for these things is their spontaneity. They write themselves — “after hours,” chiefly. In their day and generation many good folk seemed to like some of them and many did not.
A collection of the columns was published in 1919 or 1920 and may now be found online at archive.org. Later collections were issued in 1921 and 1924, but a 1926 column was obviously not included in any of them. Fortunately, it is now online in its original newspaper publication.
Teaching mostly-hiatus continues, but expect more blog posts and a couple of special projects finishing up this month!
I am mostly on hiatus from teaching this summer, but will have a couple of workshops at the end of August. Stay cool!
I am mostly on hiatus from teaching this summer, but I will still do my two regular monthly Regency workshops in Middletown, Connecticut, and New York City! (Edited to add: and a cross-step waltz workshop in New York City!)
The first thing to know about “The Tempest” is that, despite the name, it is not a version of “La Tempête”. The latter is a different dance with different music and a much longer and more exotic pedigree.
“Tempest” is a mid-nineteenth-century American contra dance with a delightfully unusual formation, as shown at left in a (relatively) modern illustration from Ricky Holden’s The Contra Dance Book (1956) (paid link). The squares represent gentlemen and the circles, ladies. There are earlier illustrations, but this is the only one I’ve found that shows the dance in action.
Descriptions of the formation are very clear that the dancers line up couple facing couple, widely spaced, with the frequent suggestion of six to eight couples on each side, though there’s no reason beyond the length of dancing time that there can’t be more.
The dance is started off by the two couples at the head of each line peeling inward and going down the middle four abreast, as can be seen in the diagram. As those two couples progress down the set, each pair of couples reaches the top, waits out once, and then turns into the line of four to begin the dance in turn. This is the standard early progression style for country dances, as described in detail here. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, it was not unheard of for multiple couples to start simultaneously in a country dance. Boston musician-caller-author Elias Howe, whose books are, collectively, one of the major sources for “Tempest”, was quite explicit about this. So it would not be unreasonable to start multiple lines of four simultaneously. The dance would continue until all couples have had a chance to rise to the top of a set, dance down it, and return to their original places.
The topic of mescolanzes, four-facing-four country dances, and whether the famous dance La Tempête was the only surviving member of the genre by the mid- to late nineteenth century, came up in an email exchange recently. Mescolanzes are one of those dance genres for which I have spent years slowly accumulating examples, so I thought I’d talk a little bit about the format and where dances called mescolanzes appeared over the course of the nineteenth century.
I’m going to limit this quick survey to more-or-less anglophone countries — England, America, Scotland, Canada, and Australia — since I’ve not yet collated all the information I have from other countries. I’m also not going to discuss La Tempête specifically, since that is an enormous topic all on its own. Here and now, I will only survey dances appearing under the name or classification “mescolanze” and its several (mis)spellings.
June starts out crazy for me with a trip to Washington and New York and a weekend in the Catskills, then everything calms down as I wind up my spring waltz class serieses and head toward a summer hiatus that I'm taking to give myself time to work on some special projects.
Almost six and a half years ago, I reconstructed and briefly discussed the Flirtation Figure, which appeared in William Lamb’s How and What to Dance (London, 1903 or 1904) as a separate figure after the usual five figures of the first set of quadrilles. My slightly revised reconstruction of Lamb’s figure:
Flirtation Figure (8 bars + 32 bars x4 + 8 bars)
8b Introduction (not repeated)
4b Grand Circle: all take hands and forward and back
4b All turn partners two hands
4b All four ladies forward and back
4b All four gentlemen forward, turn, and bow to lady at their left (their corner lady)
4b Facing corners, all balance by stepping right, close left behind, step right, touch toe of left in front (1, 2, 3, 4); repeat to left
4b Turn corners two hands, ending in gentleman’s original place and taking closed hold
8b All galopade around the set (four-slide galop to each position, alternating over hands/over elbows)
Repeat previous thirty-two bars three more times. After last repetition:
8b Grand Circle and turn partners two hands
I didn’t realize my way of teaching heys for three was particularly unusual until one of my regular musicians, who is himself a contra dance caller, commented on it, impressed by how quickly I was able to get a roomful of dancers at a public ball (meaning dancers of wildly mixed ability and experience) doing heys in unison. Since heys of one sort or another are especially popular in early nineteenth century dance, I teach them frequently and prefer not to take too much time about it, especially when calling at a ball.
My little trick for teaching a hey for three is to start by teaching it from an L-shaped formation, as a “corner hey”, rather than in a straight line. I find that it can be difficult for dancers, especially beginners, to visualize the figure-eight path of the hey when they all start in a straight line, and that it is not intuitively obvious in which direction the second and third dancers move when everyone starts at once (as they should!) rather than one dancer moving and the other two waiting out a measure or two before starting.
Doing a corner hey simplifies things.
Bashes and balls! I'll be doing three public social events this month: the Mystery and Benevolence Bash at the American Folk Arts Museum in New York City; the Burning of the Ships Commemoration Ball in Essex, Connecticut; and a weekend of two balls and a workshop at a science fiction convention in Baltimore, Maryland. In between, the usual classes and a quick trip to Boston for research and Renaissance dance!
Several years ago I wrote about starting the “new waltz” of the late nineteenth century in the way recommended by Allen Dodworth, who suggested a preparatory measure of music in which the dancers move from the usual starting orientation for couple dances, gentleman facing the wall/lady facing the center of the room, to one in which the gentleman’s back is to line of dance, making it easier for him to accomplish a clean leap backward on the first step of the waltz, while the lady faces forward and can easily perform her forward leap. I’d thought at the time to make that post part of a series addressing different ways recommended for starting various forms of waltz over the course of the nineteenth century, but for one reason or another never got back to the topic.
Here’s another short installment in what is now a very drawn-out series.
I semi-jokingly call the Rag-Time Crawl “the dance for when I get tired of the Castle Schottische”. It basically fulfills the same function: easy to dance, accessible to beginners, and comforting to people who are not up to leading and following and enjoy the Macarena-like effect of everyone moving all together in the same pattern.
My source for the dance is Frank H. Norman’s Complete Dance Instructor (Ottawa, 1914). The author is J. B. McEwen of Glasgow, Scotland. I don’t know a lot about either of these gentlemen, but I can offer a few bits of trivia:
One of my students asked me at class last night whether he owned all of the dance trio Spare Parts’ CDs. Apparently not, as he was surprised to hear about the ten-year-old Dancing by the Shore: Victorian Music from Nahant.
This album seems to get less attention than their others, perhaps because the music on it cannot be pigeonholed into a single era. The word “Victorian” in the title is a bit of a stretch; more than a third of the tracks are technically pre-Victorian.
The tunes for Dancing by the Shore were pulled from sheet music in the archives of the Nahant Historical Society, and the recording was originally advertised as for its benefit. Each piece has some connection to the town of Nahant, Massachusetts, which was a popular island resort in the nineteenth century. The cover image, at left, is a depiction of the Nahant Hotel in the 1850s.
Spare Parts plays as a trio (of varying components), and they make high-quality, musically-engaging recordings good for both dancing and listening. That this album is great for the latter is a given. I will discuss the details of the tracks purely in the context of their usability for historical dancing.
This is mostly a stay-home-and write month for me, with my only significant travel being to the New England Folk Festival (NEFFA) mid-month! It's been a few years since I could last make it to NEFFA due to calendar conflicts, so I'm excited to be back and looking forward to a great weekend of dance and music!
Moving right along from my first post in the Sixdrilles series, here are the reconstructions of the next two figures:
Figure Two: L’Été (8b introduction + 24bx4)
4b First gentleman and two opposite ladies en avant and en arrière.
4b Same three chassez-dechassez (à droite et à gauche)
4b Same three traversez, gentleman crossing between the two ladies
4b Same three chassez-dechassez
4b Same three traversez/balancez [see note below] while partners balancez
4b Same three rond de trois
The figure is then repeated by the second gentleman and the two opposite ladies, the third gentlemen and two opposite ladies, and the fourth gentleman and two opposite ladies.
The Sixdrilles are a clever reworking of the figures French Quadrille (or First Set) for a group of twelve dancers in the form of a square of trios, each consisting of a gentleman and two ladies. I have two Scottish sources for them, which match fairly closely:
The Ball-Room, by Monsieur J. P. Boulogne (Glasgow, 1827).
Lowe's Ball-Conductor and Assembly Guide…Third Edition, by the Messrs. Lowe (Edinburgh, c1830)
Monsieur Boulogne is billed as French, but I know no more about him. The Messrs. Lowe were a group of four brothers, all dance teachers, one of whom eventually became famous as dancing master at Balmoral for the family of Queen Victoria. Their book is difficult to date, especially since it is a third edition. A reference to the Sixdrilles being created around the time of the coronation of Charles X puts it at 1824 or later, and a late reference to the opera Guillaume Tell (Paris, 1829) at the very end of the book suggests 1830 onward. The last half-dozen pages look like a later attachment, however, and may have been added for the second or third edition. The Sixdrilles appear much earlier and are integrated into the overall work.
Greetings from Kyiv, Ukraine! I'm here preparing to teach a whole slew of classes in dance from the early nineteenth century through the early twentieth, with a side-helping of Steampunk!
After Kyiv, I'll be back in Russia briefly for a quick trip to teach in Voronezh before heading home to a more relaxing second half of the month of my regular waltz and Regency classes, including a special one-shot class on easy 1910s waltz choreographies and the beginning of four-week a series on nineteenth-century waltz.
Back on the road again for real this month: after the usual round of weekly waltz and monthly Regency workshops and a historical/modern mashup dance in New York City, I will once again be heading off to Europe for the first two stops of a four-city tour that will take me to three cities in Russia and one in Ukraine! Catch me for dance workshops or private lessons on one continent or the other!
2016 being a leap year, some folks have been chatting about leap year balls or leap day dances, including the idea of such balls being a traditional occasion for ladies to ask gentlemen to dance, rather than the standard vice-versa. I’m not sure how far back that tradition actually goes, but it reminded me of an amusing story published in Atkinson’s Saturday Evening Post & Bulletin in 1835, entitled “The Ladies’ Ball”.
Atkinson’s Saturday Evening Post & Bulletin was a Philadelphia newspaper published under various names from 1800; Samuel Atkinson was the publisher from 1831-1839. Along with domestic and foreign news, Atkinson also included essays, fiction, poetry, household hints, etc. Its descendant survives to this day as the bimonthly Saturday Evening Post, famous in the mid-twentieth century for its Norman Rockwell covers.
“The Ladies’ Ball” tells the story of a social crisis: the gentleman of a certain nameless city, distracted by the study of mnemonics and other sciences, had forgotten to organize the traditional Christmas ball.
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Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian
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