Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian
Crazy, crazy, crazy April! I'll be spending some time in Chicago again plus a couple of weekends in New York/New Jersey. In between I have Research Hibernation Time and an open series of cross-step waltz classes before leaving on the 29th for another trip to Russia! Catch me if you can!
I still have some details and links to add, but here's the basic schedule:
TL;DR version: Regency, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Regency, Regency, Regency, Waltz.
I'll be adding more links and details over the next few days, but here's the general plan for March, featuring my exciting Russian whistle-stop tour!
Things start getting busy in mid-February before building up to my absolutely crazy March!
I've now added to Kickery the oft-requested calendar of my workshops and events past the current month; check the Gig Calendar for upcoming events from March onward!
In honor of tonight’s incoming blizzard, and because I’ve been thinking lately about cotillion figures that scale up well for large groups, let’s talk about Les Boules de Neige. For those who don’t speak French, that would be…The Snowballs!
I come across little tidbits of information about dance history in the oddest places.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, better known as the Mormon church, places a premium on genealogical research for theological reasons. This has inspired one Mormon family, the Blakes, to create a website about their immediate ancestors.
Among the reminiscences on their site is an interesting excerpt from the book In Search of Zion: King, Youngberg and Allied Families by Richard K. Hart, which apparently features the recollections of one James King, a friend of Blake ancestor Walter Frank Blake (1880-1965).
According to the information on the Blake family site, Walter Blake was born in England and immigrated to Utah with his parents at the age of two. His mother converted to the Mormon faith in the 1880s and Walter and his siblings followed suit. The King family, already Mormons, were neighbors and friends. James King recounted his memories of life in turn-of-the-century Utah farm country to his wife in 1959. Though the stereotype of Mormons is rather stuffy, apparently social dancing was (and is) allowed and even encouraged, provided that it doesn’t get too intimate or suggestive.
King’s stories of life near Utah’s Great Salt Lake include a wonderful glimpse of rural dancing around 1900:
Happy New Year!
Having basically failed to stay home quietly and write in December, I'm going to try again in late January, with two weeks of a mostly-clear schedule at the end of the month. Other than that, I'm slowly picking up my travel schedule again with the usual New York and Boston routine before it starts getting really crazy in February and March!
An open cross-step waltz class and possibly another couple of minor workshops will be added to this schedule; details TBA. Not until February!
From a book of “select and remarkable” epitaphs published in 1757:
On Mr. Maddox, a Dancing-Master, and his Wife.
They were lovely and pleasant in their Lives, and in
their Deaths they were not divided.
Hail happy Pair! predestin’d long to prove
The chastest Raptures of connubial Love!
Who took no Step thro’ Life’s perplexed Dance,
But what would well your mutual Bliss advance!
Who figur’d not a Plan but what was meant,
Again to join your Hands with fresh Content.
Tho’ ceremonious–yet with Ease still fraught;
The very Image of the Art you taught !
Polite in all Life’s mazy Measures try’d,
As the gay Partner to his destin’d Bride.
Twice thirty Years in gentle Wedlock past,
The first was not so happy as the last !
Still each to each so complaisantly gay,
As raptur’d Lovers on their Nuptial Day !
All wing’d with Down their Years advancing roll,
And still improve this Unison of Soul!
Unvarying–courtly to his latest Breath,
He gave his Spouse Precedence e’en in Death.
The truest Honours to each other given,
He just surviv’d, then led her up to Heaven.
For Christmas Day, let’s return to Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., looking this time at the fifth number, published in America on January 1, 1820, and covering the English celebration of the Christmas holidays. The description of the old-fashioned English Christmas at the fictional Bracebridge Hall was based on Irving’s personal experience at Aston Hall in the late 1810s and, as is well-known to scholars and obvious even to the casual reader, was a major influence on Charles Dickens when he came to write A Christmas Carol.
Four of the five sketches in the fifth number contained dance references. I’ll take them one by one, skipping over the first sketch (“Christmas”) which merely provides an overview of the excitement of celebrating the Christmas holyday [sic] in England. Page numbers reference the London second edition of 1820.
I’ve been looking for something amusing to wind up the centennial year of the foxtrot, and I found it in the November 17, 1914, issue of The Richmond Times-Dispatch: some fashion advice for the foxtrotting ladies in the store advertisement shown at left:
Fox-Trotting Without a Fox Trot Hat
is like joy riding on a steam roller.
How do I follow up a line like that? I can only suggest reading the rest of the ad (click to enlarge) for more delightfully fulsome language.
For historical dancers, this is a reminder that during the 1910s, dancing in a hat at an afternoon thé dansant was perfectly proper, though judging by the advertisement, either not everyone agreed or not everyone succeeded in finding a suitable hat:
(more…)“…George Cowls says tell Nancy he is right in his glory to day and when he comes home he is agoing to dance the spanish dance with you and he says tell Abby he is agoing through ceders swamp with her…”
— Pvt. Jairus Hammond to Nancy Titus, December 8, 1862
Here’s rare documentation of a specific dance: a mention in a letter from a Union soldier during the American Civil War to his sister, dated one hundred and fifty-two years ago today, that another man plans to dance the Spanish Dance (previously described here) with her when he returns. There has been no real doubt that the Spanish Dance was actually danced and was as popular as its frequent appearance in dance manuals suggests. I have found it listed on dozens of dance cards. But this is another little piece of documentation demonstrating that its popularity extended well down the social scale.
As previously noted, I always have an eye out for dances named after Yale University and Yale-related dance ephemera. Walking through the campus earlier today on my way to a meeting reminded me that I had another Yale-themed dance to discuss: the Yale Schottische, which was published with the eponymous sheet music in 1895 and dedicated to the Yale University Football Association. Yale has one of the oldest football programs in the world and was a regular national title winner in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Some of the players pictured at left (click to enlarge) are probably among the several Yalies of the 1890s chosen as All-Americans or inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. (More details about Yale’s place in football history may be found here.)
This month is going to be a bit more donut-shaped schedulewise than I’d originally planned: Regency at the beginning, a couple of weeks to try to finish some major writing work, then a week or so of research travel and DJing before I get to actually collapse for a week!
Here’s the schedule so far, with one or two potential things still pending:
The classic schottische of the mid-nineteenth century and its later incarnation, the Barn Dance (a.k.a. the Military Schottische and the Pas de Quatre) had mostly faded from fashionable ballrooms by the late 1910s. But a few very simple schottisches or schottische-like sequences turn up now and then in dance manuals and on sheet music of the 1910s, often under the name “gavotte”, a musical form with the same 4/4 meter characteristic of the schottische.
La Gavotte is a short sequence taken from Professor A. Lacasse’s La Danse apprise chez soi, published in Montréal in 1918. There were many dances called “gavotte” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not all of them in 4/4 time, so while this particular gavotte may have been locally popular in Montréal, it should not be considered any sort of definitive gavotte for the 1910s or any other era.
November starts out crazy with New York, Boston, and Gettyburg trips the first three weekends and then calms down at the end of the month as I get a head start on my holiday research/writing period by hibernating over Thanksgiving weekend.
Here are the details so far, with potential blues DJing still TBD now with added blues DJing:
I’ve had sequence dances on my mind recently after some discussion earlier this week, which reminded me of this little sequence from the the second edition of F. Leslie Clendenen’s 1914 compilation Dance Mad. It appears there under the name “American Grapevine Dance” by Anthony J. Giaconia of Springfield, Massachusetts. I know nothing about Mr. Giaconia except that on June 24, 1912, he was quoted on the front page of The Indianapolis News as one of a convention of dancing masters appalled by dances like the Grizzly Bear and Bunny Hug. He found some dancing in a park there so disgraceful that it ought to be stopped “for the sake of decency”.
The Grapevine Dance is so short (only eight bars) that it doesn’t feel long enough to be a sequence dance all on its own, but the two measures in which the dancers move directly into the center of the room and back make it mildly risky to use simply as a variation; moving abruptly back and forth across the line of dance can cause problems for dancers coming up behind. Doing this from an “inside lane” near the center of the room will be more polite if it is not being done in unison as a sequence dance.
One hundred and sixteen years ago today, the magazine Harper’s Bazaar published a brief blurb predicting fashionable dances for the winter would be of “military tone”, no doubt influenced by the burst of patriotic fervor occasioned by the brief Spanish-American War, which by the autumn of 1898 had moved into peace negotiations. The article gives a quick peek at what dances interested Americans (or, at least, American dancing masters) in the second-to-last winter of the nineteenth century.
Unsurprisingly, the writer acknowledges the “extraordinary popularity” of the two-step. The five-step schottische is called a “new” schottische, which is inaccurate, since it had been around since at least 1890, when it was included in M. B. Gilbert’s Round Dancing, and possibly as early as 1871 under a different name. The dance may have been receiving a fresh push from the assembled masters of The American Society of Professors of Dancing, whose meeting seems to have spurred this little notice. No other couple dances are mentioned.
In almost seven years of writing Kickery (has it really been that long?) I think I’ve only once said anything at all detailed about the Grand March, which was generally performed as the opening dance at American balls in the latter part of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, though occasionally it appears later on the program. Clearly an overview is overdue!
This isn’t it.
While working recently on the ball program for a pair of Civil War-era balls to be held in Gettysburg in November, I started wondering idly how many ways there were to end a Grand March. So I made a little list. I won’t be using most of these, alas; the Gettysburg balls are insanely crowded and thus do not lend themselves to really interesting Marches. But I thought it might be fun to share some of the possibilities.
Earlier this year I talked about nine different variations from the handy little booklet Edna Stuart Lee's Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916) in two mini-series, starting here (three posts) and here (two posts). My choice of sequences may have given the impression that Lee's collection was mostly odd little variations with (often) even odder names (Chaplin Trot, anyone?) That's because I was skipping over the simplest sequences given by Lee, since I have encountered them elsewhere and written about them, or similar sequences, in earlier posts.
Here, I'm going to give a quick rundown of eight very basic sequences that Lee included among her more unusual and/or unique ones so that it is clear that there was a certain basic repertoire overlapping what is found in many other sources.
Most of this month will be relatively quiet time at home getting ready for my annual Regency Assembly and doing workshops in preparation for that. At the end of the month I'll be traveling south to Baltimore/Washington and North Carolina, then will be home to start a series of regular weekly waltz workshops. No blues DJing this month, alas!
A few details are still to be worked out, but here's the overall schedule:
Getting useable music for Regency-era dancing is a chronically frustrating problem, and there are very few albums I can recommend wholeheartedly. Many of the recordings advertised as “Regency” or “Jane Austen” suffer from a weirdly expansive idea of “Regency era” that goes back to the 17th century or forward to the 20th. Almost all have an incorrect number of repeats of the music for period dancing, which matches repeats to set length in a specific way that does not accord with modern recording habits.
Dance and Danceability is an Austen-themed album of country dance tunes from the Scottish dance band The Assembly Players (Nicolas Broadbridge, Aidan Broadbridge, and Brian Prentice). Aidan Broadbridge is a name that may be especially recognizable to Austen enthusiasts — he was the fiddler for the 2005 film adaptation of Pride & Prejudice
Sadly, this is one of the frustrating CDs.
Saturday, October 18th, in New Haven, Connecticut we will have a night of Regency-era revelry with a masquerade ball in the style of Vauxhall Gardens, the famous pleasure gardens of early 19th century London! This will be our twelfth annual Regency Assembly in New Haven.
(more…)Back in the saddle after a very productive (and mostly fun) trip to exciting places in August. September puts me back into my usual teaching routine with classes in New York, Middletown, and Boston; a dance weekend in Chicago; and a side-trip to Canada for a private workshop and some off-the-grid time!
I'm still working out my class schedule for the rest of this month, but here are the highlights. Check back for a few new things toward the end of the month.
August is vacation month, for my personal definition of vacation that involves a lot of time spent in libraries and talking about dance history and otherwise geeking out. This is differs from my normal routine of a lot of time spent in libraries and talking about dance history in that the libraries are located and the conversations and geeking out will occur in exciting foreign countries.
The beginning of the month will have only my routine monthly workshops. At the end of the month, I have scheduled five days of jet-lagged stupor. Details of the former:
The Five Step York, created by Indianapolis dancing master D. B. Brenneke, is yet another of the myriad variations for the York, one of the more durable and popular redowa/mazurka waltz variations of the late nineteenth century. It builds directly on Brenneke’s own New York sequence. While it is not a regular part of my “York set”, the Five Step York is an easy little variation to add to one’s York repertoire.
I am aware of only two published descriptions of the Five Step York: in English, in M. B. Gilbert’s Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890), and in French, in [George] Washington Lopp’s La Danse (Paris, 1903), where it is listed as “Le York à 5 Pas”. Gilbert puts it under redowa/mazurka variations, and Lopp lists it as a mazurka. Much of Lopp is simply a translation of Gilbert, but he differs just enough to add either clarity or confusion to some of the descriptions. In this case, I believe that both Gilbert and Lopp have flaws in their descriptions, but I can make two reasonable guesses as to what the actual sequence should be.
Concluding my extended celebration of the foxtrot‘s centennial year: more about the hop-turn!
A few years ago, I considered hopping in the 1910s foxtrot to be a relatively obscure practice — I’d only ever found one sequence with a hop in it and had only a brief mention in a newspaper article to reassure me that it was not just a one-couple oddity. But looking through Edna Stuart Lee’s Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916), there are actually several sequences that include hops, including two that are strikingly similar to the previously described Bassett/Elliott hop-turn.
Here are two more ways to, in the words of the newspaper article, “make our turn with a quick, fast hop” while foxtrotting.
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Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian
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