Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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Author: Susan de Guardiola

  • The Sixdrilles (1 of 3)

    The Sixdrilles are a clever reworking of the figures French Quadrille (or First Set) for a group of twelve dancers in the form of a square of trios, each consisting of a gentleman and two ladies.  I have two Scottish sources for them, which match fairly closely:

    The Ball-Room, by Monsieur J. P. Boulogne (Glasgow, 1827).

    Lowe's Ball-Conductor and Assembly Guide…Third Edition, by the Messrs. Lowe (Edinburgh, c1830)

    Monsieur Boulogne is billed as French, but I know no more about him.  The Messrs. Lowe were a group of four brothers, all dance teachers, one of whom eventually became famous as dancing master at Balmoral for the family of Queen Victoria.  Their book is difficult to date, especially since it is a third edition.  A reference to the Sixdrilles being created around the time of the coronation of Charles X puts it at 1824 or later, and a late reference to the opera Guillaume Tell (Paris, 1829) at the very end of the book suggests 1830 onward.  The last half-dozen pages look like a later attachment, however, and may have been added for the second or third edition.  The Sixdrilles appear much earlier and are integrated into the overall work.

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  • The Ladies’ Ball, 1835

    2016 being a leap year, some folks have been chatting about leap year balls or leap day dances, including the idea of such balls being a traditional occasion for ladies to ask gentlemen to dance, rather than the standard vice-versa.  I’m not sure how far back that tradition actually goes, but it reminded me of an amusing story published in Atkinson’s Saturday Evening Post & Bulletin in 1835, entitled “The Ladies’ Ball”.

    Atkinson’s Saturday Evening Post & Bulletin was a Philadelphia newspaper published under various names from 1800; Samuel Atkinson was the publisher from 1831-1839.  Along with domestic and foreign news, Atkinson also included essays, fiction, poetry, household hints, etc.  Its descendant survives to this day as the bimonthly Saturday Evening Post, famous in the mid-twentieth century for its Norman Rockwell covers.

    “The Ladies’ Ball” tells the story of a social crisis: the gentleman of a certain nameless city, distracted by the study of mnemonics and other sciences, had forgotten to organize the traditional Christmas ball.

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  • On evening parties with dancing, 1860

    The most fashionable as well as pleasant way in the present day to entertain guests is to invite them to evening parties, which vary in size from the “company,” “sociable,” “soiree,” to the party, par excellence, which is but one step from the ball.

    The entertainment upon such occasions may vary with the taste of the hostess or the caprice of her guests.  Some prefer dancing, some music, some conversations.  Small parties, called together for dramatical or poetical readings, are now fashionable, and very delightful.
    — The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness

    I first came across Florence Hartley’s The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness (G. G. Evans: Philadelphia, 1860) via the July, 1861, issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book, which excerpted the section on the etiquette for a lady hosting an evening party.  There is a matching section for the (female) guests at an evening party as well as sections for ladies hosting or attending balls.  I have spent a great deal of time over the years reading about mid-nineteenth century ballroom etiquette, but considerably less on that for more informal events.  I thus found Mrs. Hartley’s thoughts on the subject quite interesting.  It would be fun to host smaller events such as these, if one had both the sizable rooms and the servants that Mrs. Hartley assumes will be available or hired for the night.

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  • A ball in Milwaukee, 1847

    One of the weirder books I’ve ended up flipping through lately is Milwaukee Under the Charter, From 1847 to 1853, Inclusive, by James S. Buck.  This is the third volume of a series on the Pioneer History of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which amasses a bizarre collection of historical trivia about life in Milwaukee in the early to mid-nineteenth century.  Buck is not exactly a scintillating author, and he jumps around somewhat randomly from events to people to what seems like the history of every building in the city.  You get chapter summaries like this one for the year 1847:

    Opening Address—Democratic Policy and its Effects—War on the Constitution—Meeting of January 30th, at the Council Room—L. P. Crary—S. P. Coon—Job Haskall—Ordinance Passed—Business Directory—Sketch of J. F. Birchard and of Edward Emery—R. W. Pierce—Graffenburg Pills—Bridges—Sketch of Hon. J. H. VanDyke—McGregor Female Seminary—August Greulich—Badger Supper—An Old Settler—David Bonham—Political—Noonan vs. King—The Earthquake—Steamers—April Election—Retirement of Solomon Juneau—Reliance Works of Decker & Saville—Sketch-New Board—Jonathan Taylor—Torch Light Procession—Report of School Commissioner—John B.Smith—Incidental—Council Proceedings—Tavern Inspectors—Leonard Kennedy, Sketch of—Report of Finance Committee—Brick Sidewalks—Painting a Painter—The Empire Mill—Assessments—Legislative—Fall Election—William Shew’s Speech—Exports and Imports.

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  • Mysteries of the Manitou

    I keep saying that I don’t think there’s much need to memorize all the variations in sources like Melvin Ballou Gilbert’s Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) in order to accurately reenact the social dance of late nineteenth-century America. But I keep reconstructing and posting them anyway, since I find there’s often something to learn by examining how they’re constructed.  The dance published as the “Maniton”, which I am fairly sure is a typo for “Manitou”,  has two elements that caught my interest: a major change between sources and an unusual use of the “new waltz”, the late nineteenth-century version of the box step that I’ve been thinking and writing about recently.

    First, the name.  In Gilbert, both the index and the title within the text are “Maniton”.  As far as I can tell, that just isn’t a word.  In the other source for the dance, George Washington Lopp’s La Danse (Paris, 1903), much of which is merely a French translation of Gilbert, it is “Maniton” in the text but “Manitou” in the index.  I think the latter is the actual name of the dance and/or its intended music.  Switching “n” for “u” is a typesetting error I’ve encountered elsewhere.

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  • The Trio

    Since I frequently have to deal with an imbalance in numbers between the ladies and the gentlemen at nineteenth century balls, I’m always interested in dances that use a trio formation.  This can be one gentleman with two ladies or vice-versa, though the former is the more common situation.

    This dance, simply called “The Trio”, appears in at least two editions of Elias Howe’s American dancing master, and ball-room prompter (Boston, 1862 and 1866).  Howe’s instructions are a bit vague and neglect to mention the actual timing of the figures, but a little experimentation convinced me that the following reconstruction is workable and fun.  This is an extremely easy dance, good for groups of beginners.

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  • Respect the box step

    I’ve been thinking a lot over the last few years about the underlying skills needed for various forms of social dance.  A critical one is the ability to shift steps between time signatures, as I discussed a couple of months ago.  And one of the best examples of that is what happened with the much-maligned “box step” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

    The box step doesn’t get a lot of respect among historical dancers in America because it is strongly associated with modern ballroom dance studio practices.  That’s unfortunate, because I’m increasingly convinced that its historical incarnation, the “new waltz” (in contrast to the older valse à trois temps with its pirouette), is extremely important to know for anyone studying American social dancing of the 1880s-1910s.  Despite this, it often gets pushed aside in favor of the older style, which is usually taught first and thus becomes the default social waltz in modern reenactment.  That’s not wrong, exactly; it’s not like the older waltz vanished in favor of the new. But I think that we ought to be spending a lot more time on the new waltz, because it appears to be one of the fundamental building blocks of the social dance of the entire late Victorian/Edwardian/ragtime era.

    Let’s look at how the box step got used historically:

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  • Trips to Paris

    This post is for Allison, Graham, and Alan, who know and care.  

    If I expect to get anything done in my life, I cannot spend my time wandering around the net getting irritated by the dance history errors.  But I do pay attention when they arrive by email.  So I noticed when a mailing list query about how best to dance “A Trip to Paris” at a Jane Austen ball appeared in my inbox.  Happily, I was neither the first nor the last list member to jump in with some version of “That dance is from Walsh, from 1711, and does not belong at a Jane Austen ball!”  (Jane Austen lived from 1775-1817, and her dancing days would have started in the early 1790s.)

    I did get intrigued by one comment in the ensuing discussion: that the dance had been “republished by Thomas Cahusac in 24 Country Dances for 1794” and therefore might have been danced by Jane Austen.  That’s a terrifically specific citation — hurray! — but I instantly doubted it, since (1) very few dances or tunes of the earlier style were reprinted that late (young people, then and now, not being particularly into dancing their great-grandparents’ dances), and (2) I already knew there were other tunes called “A Trip to Paris” and other dance figures printed with them.  As another list member pointed out, it’s a very generic sort of title.

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  • A ballroom brawl, 1804

    Going beyond simple rudeness in the ballroom, here’s a wonderful account of a French-American culture clash turned violent at a ball in New Orleans on January 23, 1804.  Aside from showing what people of that era would fight over and how hair-trigger tempers were in New Orleans in particular at that time, it also usefully documents some ballroom dance practices of the era.  Slowly piecing together such tidbits eventually allows me to draw larger conclusions.

    I’m not going to explain the whole background of the Louisiana Purchase, which transferred an enormous swathe of North America from French to American control in 1803, but it is worth noting that the formal transfer of New Orleans itself took place on December 20, 1803, only a month or so before the incident described.  There is a suggestion earlier in the article that feelings were running high among the French in the wake of (perceived?) American disrespect during the replacement of the French flag with the American one.  There had already been a “slight misunderstanding” at a previous assembly on January 6th.  The fight on the 23rd is a small example of the sort of cultural conflicts that would be a problem in New Orleans society for decades afterward.

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  • Tired of the company, 1789

    I’ve recently been reminded by some discussions on a mailing list that there are plenty of people who don’t really have much grasp of the social context of dance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century or that a ball could be a much more complicated and socially perilous event than just a bunch of folks getting together and having a nice time dancing.

    Here’s an interesting example of rudeness on the dance floor wielded as a social weapon.

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Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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