Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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Author: Susan de Guardiola

  • Christmas Hornpipe

    After my last experience with hornpipes, it’s nice to have a contra recommended for tunes called hornpipes without having to hunt down or worry unduly about the music!

    “Christmas Hornpipe” is the name of the tune in the image below, taken from Elias Howe’s Improved Edition of the Musician’s Omnibus (Boston, 1861).  Click to enlarge.

    Christmas Hornpipe

    Whether to call the figures “Christmas Hornpipe” is a more ambiguous question, since they appear with other tunes as well (more on this below), reused in the same way figures were in the extended Regency era, from at least 1858 through the mid-1890s.

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  • Same-Gender Couples in the Regency Ballroom

    One of the critical elements of serious dance history is cross-checking what the dancing masters says in dance manuals against the evidence we have — if any — of what people actually did.  Those two things aren’t always the same.  Dancing masters generally explain what people ought to be doing, sometimes interspersed with lengthy complaints about what people are doing instead.  Both rules and complaints are useful guides, depending on whether one wants to strive to dance well and politely by period standards, or dance badly and rudely, as no doubt happened plenty in practice.

    But the very best evidence comes from the letters and diaries of people who actually lived in the relevant era.  Here’s a great example of how a letter supports something that dancing masters wrote about in the Regency era: people of the same gender dancing together.

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  • A Ballroom Repentance, 1882

    Annie Edwardes’ two-volume novel, A Ballroom Repentance (London: Richard Bentley & Sons. 1882), was apparently a somewhat racy novel by Victorian standards.  By today’s, it falls into that dreary research category of deservedly-obscure novels that I plow through for the dance scenes.

    Edwardes (c1830-1896) was an English author successful enough to publish twenty-one novels between 1858 and 1899, the last published posthumously.  Three were adapted for theatre.  I haven’t read any of her other books, but the title of this one attracted me, since it promised a ballroom scene which might have include some useful tidbits of dance information.  The ballroom scene comes very near the end, but to be thorough, I read all seven hundred or so pages of what it would be fair to call Victorian soap opera.  It’s a quick read with fewer words per page than a modern novel, so that wasn’t quite as tedious as it sounds, but I can see why Edwardes has not come down to us as a major writer.  

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  • December 2015 Gig Calendar

    I’m going to spend a big chunk of early December on the road in Ohio and Illinois doing some teaching and research and conducting a Caledonian Regency ball with a mix of French, Scottish, and English dances of the era for the English country dance community in Chicago.  Somehow I have managed to schedule four major Regency workshops or events in four different cities within an eleven-day period.  Exciting!

    After that, I’ll be quietly at home for my holiday recess/research/writing time through the New Year.  That’ll be good, too.

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  • On evening parties with dancing, 1860

    The most fashionable as well as pleasant way in the present day to entertain guests is to invite them to evening parties, which vary in size from the “company,” “sociable,” “soiree,” to the party, par excellence, which is but one step from the ball.

    The entertainment upon such occasions may vary with the taste of the hostess or the caprice of her guests.  Some prefer dancing, some music, some conversations.  Small parties, called together for dramatical or poetical readings, are now fashionable, and very delightful.
    — The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness

    I first came across Florence Hartley’s The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness (G. G. Evans: Philadelphia, 1860) via the July, 1861, issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book, which excerpted the section on the etiquette for a lady hosting an evening party.  There is a matching section for the (female) guests at an evening party as well as sections for ladies hosting or attending balls.  I have spent a great deal of time over the years reading about mid-nineteenth century ballroom etiquette, but considerably less on that for more informal events.  I thus found Mrs. Hartley’s thoughts on the subject quite interesting.  It would be fun to host smaller events such as these, if one had both the sizable rooms and the servants that Mrs. Hartley assumes will be available or hired for the night.

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  • A ball in Milwaukee, 1847

    One of the weirder books I’ve ended up flipping through lately is Milwaukee Under the Charter, From 1847 to 1853, Inclusive, by James S. Buck.  This is the third volume of a series on the Pioneer History of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which amasses a bizarre collection of historical trivia about life in Milwaukee in the early to mid-nineteenth century.  Buck is not exactly a scintillating author, and he jumps around somewhat randomly from events to people to what seems like the history of every building in the city.  You get chapter summaries like this one for the year 1847:

    Opening Address—Democratic Policy and its Effects—War on the Constitution—Meeting of January 30th, at the Council Room—L. P. Crary—S. P. Coon—Job Haskall—Ordinance Passed—Business Directory—Sketch of J. F. Birchard and of Edward Emery—R. W. Pierce—Graffenburg Pills—Bridges—Sketch of Hon. J. H. VanDyke—McGregor Female Seminary—August Greulich—Badger Supper—An Old Settler—David Bonham—Political—Noonan vs. King—The Earthquake—Steamers—April Election—Retirement of Solomon Juneau—Reliance Works of Decker & Saville—Sketch-New Board—Jonathan Taylor—Torch Light Procession—Report of School Commissioner—John B.Smith—Incidental—Council Proceedings—Tavern Inspectors—Leonard Kennedy, Sketch of—Report of Finance Committee—Brick Sidewalks—Painting a Painter—The Empire Mill—Assessments—Legislative—Fall Election—William Shew’s Speech—Exports and Imports.

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  • November 2015 Gig Calendar

    The big event for me in November is the Remembrance Day Ball in Gettysburg, which will be followed in quick succession by a Thanksgiving-weekend trip to Baltimore.  Other than that, I have my usual run of waltz and Regency workshops in Middletown and New York and, at last…conga!!!

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  • Mysteries of the Manitou

    I keep saying that I don’t think there’s much need to memorize all the variations in sources like Melvin Ballou Gilbert’s Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) in order to accurately reenact the social dance of late nineteenth-century America. But I keep reconstructing and posting them anyway, since I find there’s often something to learn by examining how they’re constructed.  The dance published as the “Maniton”, which I am fairly sure is a typo for “Manitou”,  has two elements that caught my interest: a major change between sources and an unusual use of the “new waltz”, the late nineteenth-century version of the box step that I’ve been thinking and writing about recently.

    First, the name.  In Gilbert, both the index and the title within the text are “Maniton”.  As far as I can tell, that just isn’t a word.  In the other source for the dance, George Washington Lopp’s La Danse (Paris, 1903), much of which is merely a French translation of Gilbert, it is “Maniton” in the text but “Manitou” in the index.  I think the latter is the actual name of the dance and/or its intended music.  Switching “n” for “u” is a typesetting error I’ve encountered elsewhere.

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  • The Trio

    Since I frequently have to deal with an imbalance in numbers between the ladies and the gentlemen at nineteenth century balls, I’m always interested in dances that use a trio formation.  This can be one gentleman with two ladies or vice-versa, though the former is the more common situation.

    This dance, simply called “The Trio”, appears in at least two editions of Elias Howe’s American dancing master, and ball-room prompter (Boston, 1862 and 1866).  Howe’s instructions are a bit vague and neglect to mention the actual timing of the figures, but a little experimentation convinced me that the following reconstruction is workable and fun.  This is an extremely easy dance, good for groups of beginners.

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  • Respect the box step

    I’ve been thinking a lot over the last few years about the underlying skills needed for various forms of social dance.  A critical one is the ability to shift steps between time signatures, as I discussed a couple of months ago.  And one of the best examples of that is what happened with the much-maligned “box step” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

    The box step doesn’t get a lot of respect among historical dancers in America because it is strongly associated with modern ballroom dance studio practices.  That’s unfortunate, because I’m increasingly convinced that its historical incarnation, the “new waltz” (in contrast to the older valse à trois temps with its pirouette), is extremely important to know for anyone studying American social dancing of the 1880s-1910s.  Despite this, it often gets pushed aside in favor of the older style, which is usually taught first and thus becomes the default social waltz in modern reenactment.  That’s not wrong, exactly; it’s not like the older waltz vanished in favor of the new. But I think that we ought to be spending a lot more time on the new waltz, because it appears to be one of the fundamental building blocks of the social dance of the entire late Victorian/Edwardian/ragtime era.

    Let’s look at how the box step got used historically:

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  • October 2015 Gig Calendar

    I'm home in early October and then back on the road with a vengeance — three cities in seven days to lecture, teach, research, and DJ!  After that, I'm staying home in Connecticut preparing for our thirteenth annual Regency Assembly, this year with a Parisian theme, and setting up a new set of beginner-level waltz classes in Middletown, Connecticut.  

    Towards the end of the month there will also be…conga!  (Edited to add: nope, conga next month!)

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  • Trips to Paris

    This post is for Allison, Graham, and Alan, who know and care.  

    If I expect to get anything done in my life, I cannot spend my time wandering around the net getting irritated by the dance history errors.  But I do pay attention when they arrive by email.  So I noticed when a mailing list query about how best to dance “A Trip to Paris” at a Jane Austen ball appeared in my inbox.  Happily, I was neither the first nor the last list member to jump in with some version of “That dance is from Walsh, from 1711, and does not belong at a Jane Austen ball!”  (Jane Austen lived from 1775-1817, and her dancing days would have started in the early 1790s.)

    I did get intrigued by one comment in the ensuing discussion: that the dance had been “republished by Thomas Cahusac in 24 Country Dances for 1794” and therefore might have been danced by Jane Austen.  That’s a terrifically specific citation — hurray! — but I instantly doubted it, since (1) very few dances or tunes of the earlier style were reprinted that late (young people, then and now, not being particularly into dancing their great-grandparents’ dances), and (2) I already knew there were other tunes called “A Trip to Paris” and other dance figures printed with them.  As another list member pointed out, it’s a very generic sort of title.

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  • A ballroom brawl, 1804

    Going beyond simple rudeness in the ballroom, here’s a wonderful account of a French-American culture clash turned violent at a ball in New Orleans on January 23, 1804.  Aside from showing what people of that era would fight over and how hair-trigger tempers were in New Orleans in particular at that time, it also usefully documents some ballroom dance practices of the era.  Slowly piecing together such tidbits eventually allows me to draw larger conclusions.

    I’m not going to explain the whole background of the Louisiana Purchase, which transferred an enormous swathe of North America from French to American control in 1803, but it is worth noting that the formal transfer of New Orleans itself took place on December 20, 1803, only a month or so before the incident described.  There is a suggestion earlier in the article that feelings were running high among the French in the wake of (perceived?) American disrespect during the replacement of the French flag with the American one.  There had already been a “slight misunderstanding” at a previous assembly on January 6th.  The fight on the 23rd is a small example of the sort of cultural conflicts that would be a problem in New Orleans society for decades afterward.

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  • Tired of the company, 1789

    I’ve recently been reminded by some discussions on a mailing list that there are plenty of people who don’t really have much grasp of the social context of dance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century or that a ball could be a much more complicated and socially perilous event than just a bunch of folks getting together and having a nice time dancing.

    Here’s an interesting example of rudeness on the dance floor wielded as a social weapon.

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  • September 2015 Gig Calendar

    Well, my attempt to stay at home in August and work on projects turned into spending more than half the month on the road to various libraries, events, and family members.  That was fun, and I made some intriguing discoveries and moved various research projects along, but it was not what I really needed to be doing.

    So let’s try this one more time:

    I am spending September at home getting things done.  Not even a library trip.  I may add one or two little local(ish) classes to this very short list, but the plan is to stay home this month and then go back on the road in October.

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  • Thoughts on teaching polka and polka redowa

    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.

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  • The Dip Schottische

    The Dip Schottische is one of the minor schottische sequences created by dancing masters in the early 1910s.  In this case, the author was one I. C. Sampson, of Lynn, Massachusetts, and the dance was published in both the first and second editions of F. Leslie Clendenen’s compilation Dance Mad (St. Louis, 1914).  Unfortunately, the dance instructions have one major ambiguity that makes it very difficult to come to a definitive reconstruction: what, exactly, does “turn” mean?  Here’s the original language for one move in the dance:

    “One Step” turn (pivot, four steps, two measures)

    The problem is that there is no single “one step turn”.  There are at least two very plausible candidates: the spin and the traveling turn, better known today as pivots.  If I had to guess which would be the “one step turn”, I’d guess the spin, but there are some problems with that in regard to this particular sequence.  But there are problems with the traveling turn as well.  Here’s some of what I considered when trying to choose between them:

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  • August 2015 Gig Calendar

    After an exhausting July, August will be a quiet month for me with a bunch of little trips (research and otherwise) scattered through it and catch-up work on several much-delayed projects.

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  • Early Foxtrot: The Castle Favorite

    Along with the standard early variations that come up repeatedly in the 1910s, there are also numerous little foxtrot variants that turn up only once and were probably not generally popular.  Despite the name, the "Castle Favorite", presumably a reference to the famous ballroom dancers and teachers Vernon and Irene Castle, does not turn up in any source I have that is actually by the Castles.  Instead, it appears in Edna Stuart Lee's Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916), a wonderful little source for unusual early foxtrot variations.  I don't necessarily rule out a connection with the Castles, but given how creative Lee was with variation-names, I am not taking it as a given without some actual proof.

    Lee calls this a "rather difficult step, requiring considerable practice and possibly not adapted to ordinary social dancing".  That seems an exaggerated level of concern to me; it's not difficult to dance or to lead, and I see no reason not to include it in social dancing other than it being too uncommon to bother learning.

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  • We have a problem here…

    WilkRacquetWritten on the Trans-Siberian Railroad somewhere between Novosibirsk and Moscow.  Just had to mention that!

    At left is a page from a dance manual published in Philadelphia in 1904: Dancing Without an Instructor, by one Professor Wilkinson.  This is one of the challenges I gave to the students in my just-completed reconstruction class in Novosibirsk.  Could they reconstruct this version of the racket?

    If you want to test yourself with it, click the image to enlarge it, but before diving into the technical details of the dance, take a step back mentally and read through the instructions as a whole.  Notice anything weird?

    You should.

    Don’t click through to the rest of the post until you think you’ve got it.

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  • July 2015 Gig Calendar

    July is mostly taken up by a lengthy trip to Russia (yes, again!) to teach in Perm and Novosibirsk, traveling internally via trans-Siberian railroad!  After some jet lag recovery time, I'll wind down the month with a trip to the Beau Monde writers' conference in New York City and my usual open Regency workshops.

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  • Mr. Faurot’s Hesitation Waltz

    This hesitation waltz sequence by Seattle dance teacher George G. Faurot (c1879-1954) was published in both editions of F. Leslie Clendenen’s compilation Dance Mad (St. Louis, 1914).  Faurot himself was a native of Lima, Ohio, where his uncle Ben discovered oil and his brother Lee eventually became mayor.  Faurot Park in Lima was donated by Ben and is named for him.

    According to George’s obituary, he fought in the Spanish-American War and then had a career in the oil industry before moving to Seattle, where he ran the Faurot Studio of Dancing with his wife, Nellie, for thirty years.  The Faurots’ residence in the late 1930s is now a historical site in Seattle.  The building that housed their dance studio, the Oddfellows Building, still stands and is still home to a dance studio, Century Ballroom, though the Faurot Ballroom itself seems to have been in the first-floor space which is now the Oddfellows Cafe.

    Interestingly, Lee, before becoming mayor, also seems to have dabbled in dance teaching before ending up in the insurance business and politics.  A family passion?

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  • One for the ponies!

    I've been waiting for most of my life for another horse to win the Triple Crown, and, much to my chagrin, when it finally happened I was working and therefore missed seeing it live even on television, let alone indulging my secret hope to one day see such a thing in person.  Arrgh!

    I will console myself by free-associating to a foxtrot variation: the Cavalry Charge!

    The first thing to be aware of is that Edna Stuart Lee, in her Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916), calls the following sequence "The Pony Trot" and claims that it was the original foxtrot step:

    1234    Four walking steps
    1&2&  Four trots

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  • June 2015 Gig Calendar

    June is hopefully going to be a quiet month.  I'm doing my regular monthly workshops and a bit of blues DJing, plus a lovely Steampunk weekend at a Catskills resort, but mostly I am staying home to take care of various non-dance matters, try to catch up on my writing, and prepare for yet another lengthy trip to Russia. 

    Sometime this month there is likely to be a crowdfunding campaign, too!  Want to help?

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  • May 2015 Gig Calendar

    Lots of fun ahead in May!  I'll spend the early part of the month in Moscow teaching an experimental new class in 16th century improvisation at the Anno Domini festival before heading back home for a Regency ball and then to Boston to spin some blues and back to New York City for some ragtime!

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Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

Email Susan

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