In honor of the freezing cold winter weather, I’m returning to H. Layton Walker’s Twentieth Century Cotillion Figures (Two Step Publishing Company, Buffalo, New York, 1912) for a pair of cotillion figures themed around the then-current news of the attempts by explorers Robert Peary and Frederick Cook to be the first to reach the North Pole in 1908-1909. At the time Walker’s book was written, there was a lively conflict going on between the two men as to who could claim the polar laurels. Since then, both accounts have been discredited to varying degrees, but it seems to still be something of an ongoing debate among scholars. There’s an interesting account of the two expeditions and the contemporary debate at the Smithsonian Magazine website, which I recommend for anyone wanting more historical perspective.
Author: Susan de Guardiola
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Ladies leading, 1898
Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about some of the tidbits of evidence of ladies or gentlemen dancing in same-gender couples in Regency-era ballrooms. I’m returning to the topic of same-gender dancing with an interesting article I discovered in an issue of a late-nineteenth-century American dance magazine, The Two Step, published at the time by dancing master and author H. N. Grant, out of Buffalo, New York.
The June, 1898, issue (Vol. 5, No. 47) includes a short essay on an important topic: “May a Lady Dance Backward.” It opens with a strong statement in favor:
Should a lady be taught to use the backward step in the waltz?
Yes we say, most emphatically yes.
That opens up all sorts of interesting questions, doesn’t it? Were ladies not generally even taught to waltz backward? Was that actually controversial?
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A miscellany of mescolanzes
I don’t often get asked to write about particular topics on Kickery, but I recently received, via the comments here, a request from a teacher at Mrs. Bennet’s Ballroom, a historical dance group in London, UK, for a few of my favorite figures for mescolanzes, the four-facing-four country dance format I surveyed earlier this year. Since the focus of the group seems to be the Regency era, I’ll stick with figures from manuals by London dancing master G. M. S. Chivers, which are from the very tail end of the official Regency period (1811-1820) and a few years after.
As I discussed in my earlier survey, Chivers seems to have really liked the mescolanze format, and a few other dancing masters and authors picked it up, but other than the special case of La Tempête, I can’t really say with confidence that mescolanzes were a popular or even common dance form in nineteenth-century England. But the format appears across enough different sources that I’m comfortable with using it sparingly to add variety for the late Regency and immediate post-Regency era. I don’t ever do more than one mescolanze at a ball, however.
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Giving thanks!
It's that time of year again…the start of the (American) winter holiday season, and the culturally-ordained time to give thanks!
This year a big thank-you goes to my wonderful Patrons, whose financial support of this blog through Patreon keeps me researching and writing as well as providing a level of emotional support that's really helpful for a freelancer during those times when I'm curled up alone trying to work and wondering if anyone actually values what I write or appreciates the enormous effort that it takes to blog for nearly nine years and well over a quarter-million words. Your support says that you do, and that's valuable far beyond the money involved.
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Boarding House
Final cotillion figure for the month! Boarding House straddles the line between comedy and horror, making it perfect for Halloween. Along with being probably the single weirdest cotillion figure I’ve ever seen, which is saying a lot, it’s also the most elaborate, requiring the construction of a special trick table along with props and costumes for some of the dancers. The figure is taken from St. Louis dancing master Jacob Mahler’s 1900 compilation Original Cotillion Figures, in which it was attributed to Brooklyn dancing master William Pitt Rivers. After reading through this figure, I’m not sure I’d have wanted to have him as my dancing master!
I’ll include the full original description below, but since it is rather lengthy, I’ll start with the requirements and process for the figure.
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Red Ear Party, 1919
The description of the Red Ear Party, or Harvest Home Party, appears in Emily Rose Burt’s Entertaining Made Easy (New York, 1919). It was not a full-scale fancy dress ball, but an autumn/harvest-themed ball put on by, according to the book, a group of high school seniors as the opening event of their final year. Along with normal dancing of the era, it featured a series of novelty dances which were effectively low-key cotillions. Did the event really take place or was it imagined by Ms. Burt just for the book? Hard to say. But I’m impressed with the imagination and industry either displayed by the actual students or expected by Ms. Burt to be achievable by high school kids. I wish my teenage school dances had been like this!
The red ear of the title was not a body part but an ear of corn. The significance is said to go back to a colonial tradition in which whoever found the red ear at a corn husking party would get to kiss the girl of his choice. (You can see an example of one red ear among a lot of normal ones here.) In this case, finding the (faked) red ear was used to select a “queen” for the party.
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Prince Leopold’s Birthday Ball, 1859
One of the most charming descriptions of a fancy dress ball in my collection is that of the event held at Buckingham Palace in honor of the sixth birthday of Queen Victoria's youngest son, Prince Leopold, on April 7, 1859. This was a juvenile, or children's, ball, but, as we know from descriptions of the dancing lessons given to Victoria's children, the level of dancing skill even at young ages was considerably higher than one would expect from children today. That said, it's not clear to me whether the youngest children really danced all the dances or whether that was left to the older ones, or perhaps the parents.
The description I have was printed in The Albion, A Journal of News, Politics and Literature, on April 30, 1859. The Albion was a weekly New York newspaper that covered British matters extensively and was read by expatriates. The description was probably copied directly from a London newspaper.
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Marching Medications
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:
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A Masked Ball in Heidelberg, 1840s
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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Fruit and Stockings
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.
