Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian
Since early 19th century (“Regency”) dance is one of my particular specialties, I get many questions that boil down to either “what did Jane Austen dance?” or “did Jane Austen dance _____?” So let’s see what I can do for a general answer.
I can divide things loosely into three categories: what we know she danced, what she might have danced, and what she didn’t dance.
Ever so often I come across the oddest little novelties. The Rock’n’Cha is a conga-line type dance which was discussed in the January, 1958 issue of Dance Magazine. The cha-cha was first introduced in the 1950s, and it seems to have spawned some weird group variants (Cha-Cha Choo-Choo Caboose, anyone?) The notes for this dance were sent to the magazine by Chicago resident Louise Ege, who attributed them to Grace Hansen, Dance Coordinator and Professional Consultant for the Chicago YMCA and head of the ballroom committee of the Chicago National Associate of Dance Masters. Mrs. Ege claimed that Chicago teens loved the dance, with it even having “replaced the Bunny Hop in their affections.” I’m not sure what this says about either the taste of Chicago teens in early 1958 or the accuracy of Mrs. Ege’s observations of contemporary teen culture.
The most popular “animal dances” of the early 1900s appear to have been the Turkey Trot and Grizzly Bear. But the F. Leslie Clendenen’s compilation manual Dance Mad (St. Louis, 1914) offers a pair of one-step variations attributed to London dance teacher Walter Humphrey, who apparently found inspiration in the hopping of Australian marsupials. I’ve never found these variations in any other source, so it’s not clear to me how widespread they ever were. I would also have placed them a bit earlier, maybe 1908-1910, as by 1914 the animal dance fad was already well past and the smoother, more elegant style of Vernon and Irene Castle was making the one-step acceptable in respectable ballrooms. It’s possible that Mr. Humphrey and/or English dancers in general had not quite caught up with the latest American dance fads, or that Clendenen was not as fussy in compiling his book as its subtitle, “The Dances of the Day,” suggests.
For both variations, the dancers both face line of dance. It’s not clear whether they should retain joined hands in front or open up fully. I find the latter more graceful, but how much of a priority grace should be while hopping around a ballroom imitating a marsupial is debatable. Those wishing to study wallaby technique in detail may consult this National Geographic video this video of a wallaby hopping across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. (Edited 11/19/2025 to replace vanished video with a new one.)
On the lighter side of dance research…
There’s plenty of silliness in historical dance manuals, ranging from mythological origins of dancing in general to apocryphal stories about the origins of particular dances. But none of that makes me laugh quite so much as a couple of lines in Foulsham’s Modern Dancing, by Maxwell Stewart, published in London around 1925 and ambitiously subtitled “A guide to everything the dancer old and young, skilled and unskilled, wants to know.” That was rather optimistic of Stewart; this particular dancer wishes he had included a lot more detail about some of the moves he described. But the following has got to be one of the most risible lines I’ve ever found in a dance manual.
The simplest description of the racket waltz is that it is the step of the one-slide racket converted to waltz time, with the extra beat of music per measure added to the initial slide. Edna Witherspoon, in The Perfect Art of Modern Dancing (1894), gives it the alternate title “The Society” and notes that “if thoughtlessly executed, it is a most ungraceful and unattractive dance.” Allen Dodworth, in Dancing and its Relation to Education and Social Life (1885), adds that “The racket, in this accent, is that unfortunate dance known as the “Society,” and is the medium through which not a few show an entire absence of good taste in motion.” Honestly, it’s not that bad! It does not seem to have been quite as popular or well-known as the galop–time rackets I described earlier this summer, but it is an easy dance that works well to brisk waltz music.
Line dances don’t really get all that difficult, but there are a few longer ones with more complicated and less repetitive step sequences. One of these is the Line Hustle. These instructions are taken from Carter Lovisone’s The Disco Hustle (1979) and claim to be “the original form used as the basis for all variations of the Line Hustle.” I would take this claim with a grain of salt, since Lovisone’s book came out several years after the dance’s first wave of popularity in the mid-1970s.
This version of the Line Hustle is a fifty-two beat dance. My favorite music for it is Van McCoy’s 1975 hit, “The Hustle,” a snippet of which is included below:
The song is available on several different compilations, including The Hustle & The Best Of Van McCoy
Among the moves described by Vernon and Irene Castle in their Victor Records for Dancing mini-manual (1914) are a trio of moves that are essentially box steps or fragments thereof: a so-called cortez (a.k.a. sentado or syncopated step), a double cortez, and a left-turning waltz. The rhythm is specified as QQS: three steps and hold. These make a nice set of variations to throw into basic walking-trotting sequences and two-step sequences when dancing a 1910s-style foxtrot.
Over a year ago I discussed some of the earliest walking and trotting patterns found in the earliest sources describing the foxtrot. Among other moves, I touched on the gliding series of chassé steps given in the two sequences in F. L. Clendenen’s Dance Mad (St. Louis, 1914). The sideways glides were done in quick-quick rhythm for each slide-close. The two sequences were:
1. SS-SS-QQQQ-QQQQ twice, followed by four glides (step-closes) QQQQ-QQQQ
2. SS-QQQQ, followed by four glides QQQQ-QQQQ.
The man turns his left side toward the line of dance and the dancers execute a series of four sideways “step-closes” (QQ) along the line of dance. No turn is involved; the first part of the sequence (walking and trotting) restarts on the first foot moving along the line of dance as usual.
I'm going to be traveling to two dance events in the next week, one as a student and one as a teacher.
On Saturday, July 25th, I will be attending a one-day historical dance workshop held by the New York Baroque Dance Company at Goucher College, near Baltimore, Maryland. The teachers are Catherine Turocy and Richard Powers. There will also be a country dance party in the evening, called by Catherine Turocy and Charles Garth. This event precedes a full-week workshop at Goucher which I am unable to attend because…
Reading this morning’s headlines about events in Alaska, it seems the moment to post this little French sequence dance, which can also be used to vary an early twentieth-century two-step. I’ve found this sequence in only one source: La Danse, by [George] Washington Lopp, published in Paris in 1903 as part of a two-book compendium. The smaller part (forty-five pages to the two hundred-plus of La Danse) of the compendium is a brief manual of etiquette and costume written by J. Chéron.
Mr. Lopp seems to have been an interesting character, an American expatriate and former Chicago dancing master whose partnership in a Parisian musical conservatory went extremely sour, resulting in lawsuits, lockouts, and a “very tempestuous scene” with one of the patronesses of the conservatory, who insisted on performing a concerto she had composed. Apparently the piece was so dreadful that the audience
was unable…to endure the entire infliction, and most of those present incontinently left after the first movement had been half finished.
I'm off this weekend to a Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) event, Known World Dance Symposium VII, in Hamilton, Ontario (near Toronto). I'm not an active SCA member, but I have very pleasant memories of the last one of these I went to, in Boston back in 2001. I'll be there Friday through Sunday, off and on. I'm not teaching anything, so I'm just planning to hang out with other dance geeks and do some relaxing dancing.
I'd be happy to say hi to any Kickery readers attending this event.
Combining the one-slide rackets and three-slide rackets previously described creates an interestingly varied dance which is referred to by the prominent late-nineteenth-century dancing master Melvin B. Gilbert simply as the Racket, with no further descriptor. The unadorned term is used by other writers to refer to several different variations in both 2/4 and 3/4 time, however, leaving us with unwieldy labels such as Allen Dodworth’s “Alternating the One Slide and Three Slide to Galop.”
Whatever one may call it, the sequence is not difficult once both the one-slide and three-slide rackets have been mastered. Conceptually, one simply alternates two bars of one with two bars of the other to build an eight-bar sequence. For the one-slide racket, two bars will be moving to the left and right (in whichever order); for the three-slide racket, two bars means moving either to the left or to the right. So sequences may be built as follows:
The three-slide racket extends the two-bar repeat pattern of the one-slide racket previously described into a four-bar pattern which has a more galop-like feel and is somewhat easier to initiate. It is described in the major dance late-nineteenth-century dance manuals of M.B. Gilbert and Allen Dodworth and in two minor compilation manuals, one of which (Cartier’s Practical Illustrated Waltz Instructor) names it “The Wave.”
The instructions below are for the gentleman; the lady dances opposite. The dancers start in a normal late-nineteenth-century ballroom hold with joined hands angled forward at a diagonal along the line of dance. Like the one-slide racket, the three-slide racket follows a zig-zag track along the line of dance; there is no turning involved.
The galop racket or one-slide racket is the simplest of the various rackets and is described under both names in different sources. In one Parisian manual it is simply “La Raquette,” though most other sources agree that “the” racket is a compound sequence mixing two different racket rhythms. Prominent New England dancing master M.B. Gilbert explained it simply as “Pas de Basque sidewise” in 2/4 time.
The instructions below are for the gentleman; the lady dances opposite. The dancers start in a normal late-nineteenth-century ballroom hold with joined hands angled forward at a diagonal along the line of dance. The dance follows a zig-zag track along the line of dance; there is no turning involved.
The racket, or racquet, is one of the major new couple dances that began appearing in American dance manuals in the early 1880s and lingered into the beginning of the twentieth century. It spread to France in the mid- to late 1890s. I have found no information on its origins or reference to any creator.
The racket is a lively dance that combines sideways slides and quick cuts of the feet back and forth. It can be danced in both galop (2/4) and waltz (3/4) time, though galop time appears to be the default. It was one of the few of the myriad couple dance variations of the last quarter of the nineteenth century to make it into manuals like Allen Dodworth’s Dancing and its Relation to Education and Social Life (New York, 1885, reprinted 1900), which for the most part included only the most commonly-found couple dances. (He did include one of his own invention, the Knickerbocker, and the up-and-coming Boston.)
Mixer dances, where all the participants shift partners at intervals, are useful icebreakers at dance events. In A Complete Practical Guide to Modern Society Dancing (1903), Philadelphia dancing master Albert W. Newman offers a simple mixer for use with the then-fashionable two-step, asserting hopefully that
The dancers take partners and hold hands in a grand circle, with each gentleman standing to the left of his partner, and all circle to the left (clockwise). The dance leader calls out a number (3, 7, 12, etc.), and all the dancers face their partners and begin a grand chain, giving right hands to their partners and pulling by, left to the next, right to the next, left to the next, etc. As they move, they count people, starting with their partners as “one.” When they reach the number called out by the leader, each takes ballroom position with that person and two-step until the leader gives a signal (typically a whistle), at which point all the dancers open up into a grand circle and once again circle to the left.
The Five Step Schottische, as described by prominent late 19th-century dancing master M.B. Gilbert in his tome of couple dances, Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) and later by Marguerite Wilson in her oft-reprinted Dancing (Philadelphia, 1899), squeezes five movements, rather than the standard four, into each bar of schottische for an interesting variation which alternates sideways slides and half-turns for a sequence similar to that of waltz variations such as the contemporary Le Metropole (also included in Gilbert’s manual) or the later Five-Step Boston described by Philadelphian Albert Newman in 1914. Putting this combination into schottische rhythm makes for an interesting but not overly complicated dance worth resurrecting by the modern late-19th-century dance reenactor.
F. Leslie Clendenen’s 1914 compilation, Dance Mad, is full of sequences of varying levels of difficulty for many of the popular dances of the 1910s. This one caught my eye as being a short (sixteen beats) and simple introductory one-step suitable for getting beginners dancing quickly and for teaching the lead for rhythm changes between one-step and two-step. Clendenen gives it no special name or attribution, just “One Step.”
Directions are given for the gentleman; the lady dances opposite. Starting foot is left for the gentleman and right for the lady. Begin in normal ballroom position, with the gentleman facing along the line of dance.
I will be attending the International Congress on Medieval Studies this Thursday and Friday and presenting a paper on step variation in the 15th-century saltarello at 1:30 Friday afternoon, session 301, “Riverenze e Spezzati: Challenges in Early Dance Research and Reconstruction.”
I will be teaching two dance workshops for The Elegant Arts Society in New York City this Sunday, May 3rd. Logistical details are below.
Concluding a trio of posts on easy hesitation waltzes, here is the simplest hesitation at all: a normal waltz sequence stretched over two bars of music. Albert Newman succinctly described the dance in his 1914 manual, Dances of To-Day:
In reality it is our Standard Waltz, but instead of taking two measures this Boston takes four measures.
What this works out to in practice is that the first step (forward or backward) of each half-turn is held for an entire bar (three counts) and the step to the side and close are done on the first and third counts of the second bar of music, with the overall rhythm being ONE-two-three-FOUR-five-SIX. The three steps taken over two measures give the variation one of its names; I see nothing especially English about this that would account for the other.
The Pompadour Waltz is a minor but interesting variation on the five-step Boston or five-step waltz described by Albert Newman in 1914 (and by me here). I have found it only in the collection Dance Mad, or the dances of the day, compiled by F. Leslie Clendenen and published in St. Louis in 1914.
To perform the Pompadour, the dancers alternate brief hesitating grapevine sequences with the five-step Boston in an eight-bar sequence as described below. The steps given are for the gentleman; the lady dances opposite.
In his 1914 manual, Dances of To-day, Philadelphia dancing master Albert W. Newman describes a four-bar waltz variation he calls the Five-Step Boston or Five-Step Waltz. Unlike the five-step waltz of the mid-19th century or the half-and-half of the 1910s, this waltz is done in the usual 3/4 waltz time, spreading five movements out over the six counts of music. This is a hesitation waltz movement, well-suited the fast waltzes of the early 20th century. It is easy to learn and provides a pleasant break from constant fast spinning.
I will be teaching two dance workshops for The Elegant Arts Society in New York City this Sunday, April 5th. Logistical details are below.
The illustration at left is the last of a series of illustrations for the Half and Half taken from a small book of dance music published by Malvin M. Franklin in 1914. For general information on dancing the Half and Half, an unusual 5/4 time waltz stepped on the first, fourth, and fifth beats, please see my previous post on basic traveling steps for the dance.
In the illustration, the dancers have moved from a normal ballroom hold into a variant side-by-side position in which the lady’s left arm is stretched across the gentleman’s shoulders to take his left hand at shoulder height, while their right hands are joined behind her back. In this position they move forward together with a series of “alternating steps then sliding steps” before, presumably, resuming ballroom position to continue the dance.
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Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian
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