Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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Author: Susan de Guardiola

  • Newport Fancy Dress Ball, 1850

    The final fancy dress of the Newport summer season of 1850 occurred on Wednesday, September 4th.  It was covered by The Boston Herald on September 5th (“Grand Fancy Ball at Newport”, p. 4) and more extensively by The New York Herald on September 6th (“The Grand Fancy Dress Ball at Newport”, p. 1).  The bulk of the coverage was devoted to lists of attendees and their costumes, as is typical for fancy dress balls, but there are some other tidbits of useful information as well.  The New York Herald article is extremely lengthy, so I have not transcribed all of it.  The article from The Boston Herald is quite short, but not nearly as interesting.

    The ball was held at the rebuilt Ocean House, the original of which had opened in 1844, burned down, and been rebuilt.  This Ocean House was not the same as the modern Ocean House in Newport.  A different hotel by the same name opened in 1868, was demolished in 2005, and then rebuilt again in 2010.

    At the RhodeTour website, Dr. Brian Knoth writes about the first two Ocean Houses, with specific mention of the 1850 Fancy Dress Ball:

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  • A cautionary tale, 1837

    The short story “Lyddy!”, by Thomas Egerton Wilks, was published in a London journal, The Young Lady’s Magazine, in 1837, its first year of publication, the works from which were collected in a single volume published in 1838.

    Though its title is similar to that of other ladies’ magazines of the era, The Young Lady’s Magazine actually had much loftier ambitions:

    …to concentrate every energy in the production, not only of such matter as may amuse the fancy, but at the same time tend to expand the mind, elevate the morals, refine the intellect, and awaken, — not the morbid sensibilities, too often produced by ill-selected fictions — but those pure, unhacknied feelings of the youthful heart, which are in themselves a mine of inexhaustible treasures, and which, by their development, shed a halo of enchantment around.
    — Preface, p. iii

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  • On Old Fashioned Dances, 1926

    On January 21, 1926, a column unfavorably comparing modern dancing to that of earlier eras was published in the Lewiston Evening Journal, published in Lewiston, Maine.  “On ‘Old-Fashioned Dances’ ” appeared under the column title “Just Talks On Common Themes” and the byline of A. G. S.  The initials are those of  Arthur Gray Staples (1861-1940), a Maine writer who was the editor-in-chief of the Lewiston Evening Journal (later just the Lewiston Journal) from 1919-1940.  “Just Talks On Common Themes” was his daily column.  Staples described these columns many years later in an inscription of one of his books to the Maine State Library:

    The only claim for these things is their spontaneity.  They write themselves — “after hours,” chiefly.  In their day and generation many good folk seemed to like some of them and many did not.

    A collection of the columns was published in 1919 or 1920 and may now be found online at archive.org.  Later collections were issued in 1921 and 1924, but  a 1926 column was obviously not included in any of them.  Fortunately, it is now online in its original newspaper publication.

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  • Tracking the Mescolanzes

    The topic of mescolanzes, four-facing-four country dances, and whether the famous dance La Tempête was the only surviving member of the genre by the mid- to late nineteenth century, came up in an email exchange recently.  Mescolanzes are one of those dance genres for which I have spent years slowly accumulating examples, so I thought I’d talk a little bit about the format and where dances called mescolanzes appeared over the course of the nineteenth century.

    I’m going to limit this quick survey to more-or-less anglophone countries — England, America, Scotland, Canada, and Australia — since I’ve not yet collated all the information I have from other countries.  I’m also not going to discuss La Tempête specifically, since that is an enormous topic all on its own.  Here and now, I will only survey dances appearing under the name or classification “mescolanze” and its several (mis)spellings.

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  • Revisiting the Flirtation Figure

    Almost six and a half years ago, I reconstructed and briefly discussed the Flirtation Figure, which appeared in William Lamb’s How and What to Dance (London, 1903 or 1904) as a separate figure after the usual five figures of the first set of quadrilles.  My slightly revised reconstruction of Lamb’s figure:

    Flirtation Figure (8 bars + 32 bars x4 + 8 bars)
    8b     Introduction (not repeated)
    4b     Grand Circle: all take hands and forward and back
    4b     All turn partners two hands
    4b     All four ladies forward and back
    4b     All four gentlemen forward, turn, and bow to lady at their left (their corner lady)
    4b     Facing corners, all balance by stepping right, close left behind, step right, touch toe of left in front (1, 2, 3, 4); repeat to left
    4b     Turn corners two hands, ending in gentleman’s original place and taking closed hold
    8b     All galopade around the set (four-slide galop to each position, alternating over hands/over elbows)
    Repeat previous thirty-two bars three more times. After last repetition:
    8b     Grand Circle and turn partners two hands

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  • Teaching the hey for three

    I didn’t realize my way of teaching heys for three was particularly unusual until one of my regular musicians, who is himself a contra dance caller, commented on it, impressed by how quickly I was able to get a roomful of dancers at a public ball (meaning dancers of wildly mixed ability and experience) doing heys in unison.  Since heys of one sort or another are especially popular in early nineteenth century dance, I teach them frequently and prefer not to take too much time about it, especially when calling at a ball.

    My little trick for teaching a hey for three is to start by teaching it from an L-shaped formation, as a “corner hey”, rather than in a straight line.  I find that it can be difficult for dancers, especially beginners, to visualize the figure-eight path of the hey when they all start in a straight line, and that it is not intuitively obvious in which direction the second and third dancers move when everyone starts at once (as they should!) rather than one dancer moving and the other two waiting out a measure or two before starting.

    Doing a corner hey simplifies things.

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  • Starting the Waltz, Cellarius Style

    Several years ago I wrote about starting the “new waltz” of the late nineteenth century in the way recommended by Allen Dodworth, who suggested a preparatory measure of music in which the dancers move from the usual starting orientation for couple dances, gentleman facing the wall/lady facing the center of the room, to one in which the gentleman’s back is to line of dance, making it easier for him to accomplish a clean leap backward on the first step of the waltz, while the lady faces forward and can easily perform her forward leap.  I’d thought at the time to make that post part of a series addressing different ways recommended for starting various forms of waltz over the course of the nineteenth century, but for one reason or another never got back to the topic.

    Here’s another short installment in what is now a very drawn-out series.

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  • The Rag-Time Crawl

    I semi-jokingly call the Rag-Time Crawl “the dance for when I get tired of the Castle Schottische”.  It basically fulfills the same function: easy to dance, accessible to beginners, and comforting to people who are not up to leading and following and enjoy the Macarena-like effect of everyone moving all together in the same pattern.

    My source for the dance is Frank H. Norman’s Complete Dance Instructor (Ottawa, 1914).  The author is J. B. McEwen of Glasgow, Scotland.  I don’t know a lot about either of these gentlemen, but I can offer a few bits of trivia:

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  • CD Review: Dancing by the Shore: Victorian Music from Nahant

    One of my students asked me at class last night whether he owned all of the dance trio Spare Parts’ CDs.  Apparently not, as he was surprised to hear about the ten-year-old Dancing by the Shore: Victorian Music from Nahant.

    This album seems to get less attention than their others, perhaps because the music on it cannot be pigeonholed into a single era.  The word “Victorian” in the title is a bit of a stretch; more than a third of the tracks are technically pre-Victorian.

    The tunes for Dancing by the Shore were pulled from sheet music in the archives of the Nahant Historical Society, and the recording was originally advertised as for its benefit.  Each piece has some connection to the town of Nahant, Massachusetts, which was a popular island resort in the nineteenth century.  The cover image, at left, is a depiction of the Nahant Hotel in the 1850s.

    Spare Parts plays as a trio (of varying components), and they make high-quality, musically-engaging recordings good for both dancing and listening.  That this album is great for the latter is a given.  I will discuss the details of the tracks purely in the context of their usability for historical dancing.

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  • The Sixdrilles (3 of 3)

    Wrapping up my mini-series on the Sixdrilles, here are the final two figures and some overall thoughts.  The earlier figures can be found in my first and second posts in the series.

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Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

Email Susan

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