Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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Author: Susan de Guardiola

  • Holly Berry

    • Era: late 1850s onward

    “Mrs. Henderson has introduced this dance in compliance with the request of pupils and friends, who were at a loss for a cheerful country dance in which all might join without previous instruction in the fashionable dances.”

    Holly Berry is a short set dance apparently composed by London dance teacher Mrs. Nicholas Henderson in the 1850s.  Its first known appearance is in the second edition of her Etiquette for Dancing, published in the 1850s.  The dance was also included in Elias Howe’s American dancing master and ball-room prompter, published in Boston in 1862, which appears on the Library of Congress website here.  Howe’s manual, unusually, includes a specific credit to Mrs. Henderson.

    The dance is reminiscent of the galopade country dances of the 1830s and was perhaps seen as too old-fashioned in style by the mid-19th century.  It does not appear to have been commonly reprinted and probably was not wildly popular.  But it makes an interesting change of pace in a Victorian or American Civil War-era reenactment ballroom.  (Edited 10/17/25 to add: Despite its inclusion in Howe’s book, I’ve no real evidence of it being danced in America and would not include it at a specifically American-themed ball.)

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  • Wrestling with Belle Brandon

    (Note: since this post was written, I’ve expanded my research on this figure and written a follow-up post, Revisiting Chassé Out, which discusses further sources and slightly alters my conclusion about the performance of the chassé out figure.)

    Recently my English friend and fellow dance teacher/reconstructor Colin Hume asked on the English Country Dance mailing list for help on some American dances he plans to teach later this month at a festival.  He posted his notes (the final version is now up here) and asked for advice, since he’s not a specialist on historical American dance.  I do a lot with quadrilles (French, American, English, Spanish, etc.) so I pounced on the challenge of the 1858 set he proposed to use, the Belle Brandon Set.  This five-figure quadrille is drawn from Howe’s Ball-Room Handbook (Boston, 1858) by Massachusetts dancing master and music publisher Elias Howe.

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  • A Waltz Quadrille (1893)

    By the end of the 19th century, quite a number of quadrilles were being published that didn’t follow the earlier form of having multiple separate figures.  Although this dance does have two distinct dance parts, the original instructions (which may be seen here) are clear that they should be treated as one long figure:

    Play an ordinary waltz and do not stop between the numbers.

    The source of the dance is The Prompter’s Handbook by J.A. French, published in Boston in 1893.  I haven’t looked for any other sources for this particular set of figures – it’s a trivial little quadrille which I reconstructed in order to have a late-evening set dance that was easy and provided an excuse for plenty of waltzing.

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  • Another Note on the Early Foxtrot

    While searching through a periodicals index I came across an interesting little article that neatly summarizes my previous three foxtrot posts.  “How to Dance the Fox Trot” was published in the Los Angeles Times on October 18, 1914.  It commends the dance as

    the most simple of all the new dances.  If you were discouraged when you tackled the tango or maxixe, here is a dance that every one can dance and enjoy with practically no mental exertion.

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  • Fancy Little Foxtrot

    This is a nifty little move from the short Bassett/Elliott film, “The Much Talked About ‘Fox Trot’ ” (dated 1916) and is unlike anything else I’ve ever seen in a 1910s foxtrot: it actually has a hop.  A hop in the foxtrot!  That should startle anyone watching you.  The sequence isn’t terribly difficult and should be accessible once a dancer is past the complete-novice stage.

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  • Quick-Quick-Slow: The Two-Step Infiltrates the Foxtrot

    In my previous foxtrot post I covered the basic walking and trotting patterns of the early foxtrot of the 1910s.  These patterns are characterized by alternating series of slow (S) or quick (Q) steps, simple traveling interspersed with occasional sideways glides or half-turns, and consistently starting on the same foot (gentleman’s left, lady’s right).  This simple foxtrot was complicated almost immediately by variations of rhythm, most notably the “quick-quick-slow” (QQS, or “one-and-two (pause)”) rhythm of the 19th-century two-step and polka.  This post will discuss some of the variations introduced in the pre-1920 foxtrot as described by dancing masters Maurice Mouvet (1915) and Charles Coll (1919) and demonstrated by Clay Bassett and Catherine Elliott on film (1916).

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  • Basic Walking & Trotting Patterns in the 1910s Foxtrot

    “What particular resemblance does the gait of a fox have to this dance?”
    — spectator watching trotters, as quoted in Maurice’s Art of Dancing, 1915

    It’s a reasonable question.  The foxtrot evolved so rapidly after its debut in 1913-1914 that it can be difficult to sort out the earliest versions of the dance and derive an accurate picture of the foxtrot as danced in the 1910s.

    Directions for dancing the foxtrot first began appearing in print in
    1914.  While it did not appear in Vernon and Irene Castle’s 1914 work, Modern Dancing, the Castles did include it that year in the booklet Victor Records for Dancing.  Two brief descriptions were also published in F. L. Clenenden’s compendium, Dance Mad, also published in 1914, in St. Louis.  In 1915, Maurice Mouvet published his description of the foxtrot in Maurice’s Art of Dancing, followed in 1919 by Charles Coll in Dancing Made Easy (link is to the 1922 reprint).

    In addition to these written sources, a brief silent film clip dated 1916 shows dance instructors Clay Bassett and Catherine Elliott demonstrating “The Much Talked About ‘Fox Trot’.”

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  • The Half & Half: Basic Traveling Steps

    • Era: 1910s

    The half and half, a hesitation waltz danced in 5/4 time, was one of those novelties that appeared and vanished quickly in 1914.  There may be as many people alive now who know how to dance it as ever danced it in its own era!  It is also handicapped by having very few surviving pieces of music in the right time signature.  Today’s experienced historical social dancers can probably hum the eponymous “Half and Half” from memory.  Sources describing the dance are equally difficult to come by; I have only three in my collection, though one of them, Dance Mad, generously provides four separate descriptions.

    Click here to listen to a half and half tune in 5/4 time.

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  • Bits of Bijou: The Missing Middle of Durang’s 1848 Manual

    Research on social dance history does not always involve direct work on specific dances, and occasionally I get diverted to detective work on related historical mysteries in different fields – music, language, biography, etiquette, publishing history, and more.  Over the last few weeks, I have pursued a successful quest for some pages missing from an 1840s work by Charles Durang.  The process of locating these pages illustrates some of the frustrations of working with 19th century sources and the care needed in studying them.

    In her delightful overview of 19th-century dance and etiquette, From the Ballroom to Hell (paid link), Elizabeth Aldrich states that Durang (1796-1870) was a dancer at the Bowery Theatre who later taught dance in Philadelphia with his daughter Caroline and published at least four dance manuals.  I started looking for a copy of Durang’s The Ball-Room Bijou and Art of Dancing as part of the research for a particular set of quadrilles and rapidly found myself in the midst of a publication puzzle.

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  • The New Yorker

    Another guilty-pleasure disco-era line dance!  This is one I’ve actually used regularly as an easy cool-down dance at the end of my own practices for the last couple of years.  The source is The Official Guide to Disco Dance Steps by Jack Villari & Kathleen Sims Villari, 1978.  There’s no special music for this or any other line dance, but I often use either Wild Cherry’s "Play That Funky Music, White Boy" or Donna Summers’ "Bad Girls".  The only thing even mildly unusual about the dance itself is that instead of quarter-turns after each repetition there are half-turns.

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Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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