Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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Author: Susan de Guardiola

  • Another Country Dance Gallopade

    • Era: 1830s, England

    This dance is one of a pair of country dance gallopades published in London dancing master J. S. Pollock's c1830 manual, A Companion to La Terpsichore Moderne (Second Edition).  They have no names or specific music, just numbers.  I've previously discussed the second one; now here's the first.  It's a very straightforward reconstruction.

    Here are the original instructions:

    No. 1.     (4 parts) 

        The whole of the party arranged in the same way as for a country dance stand facing the top of the room, and chassez croise all with partners — then facing your partners, all advance, retire, and back to back — first and second couples hands across and back again — first lady pass outside the ladies to the bottom of the dance, the first gent. at the same time going down outside of the gents. and turn partner with both hands, remaining at bottom.

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  • August 2013 Gig Calendar

    One more fellowship trip, a couple of workshops, and another ball, all crammed into early August!  I may add a couple of DJ stints or other workshops, but mostly this is a recovery-and-writing month after three months of near-constant travel.  I'll have some much-needed vacation time at the end before things pick up again in the fall.

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  • Setting a higher standard

    Moving on from what ought to be the rock-bottom minimal standard for anything calling itself a “Jane Austen ball”, even in the modern English country dance community, let me talk a little about higher standards, and what you’d want to do if you were interested in actually approaching as close as is practical to period practice.  I’ve made two lists, one of what I consider to be important and one of elements that I do not consider as critical.  Some items are characteristics of the dancing itself, and some have to do with ball format, because the latter is just as important as the former in establishing a period atmosphere and breaking people out of the modern mindset.

    Modern English country dance groups are unlikely to want to try most (or any!) of this, but I hope it’s interesting to see how different an experience a ball would have been two hundred years ago.  Some people have the bizarre idea that by suggesting that using “dances” (in the modern sense) from Jane Austen’s lifetime for something called a “Jane Austen ball”, I am somehow trying to impose actual historical practices on them.  No, really, not!

    For simplicity’s sake, I’ve limited this to just things pertaining to country dancing, rather than trying to cover the entire range of possible dance forms for either Austen herself or the actual decade of the Regency.

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  • Jane Austen balls for dummies

    First off, let me note that the title of this post is not a comment on anyone’s intellect.  It’s a riff on the titles of the popular series of “For Dummies” books, which are intended simply as accessible how-to guides for people who are not familiar with a topic.  I have a couple of them myself.  Neither I nor this post have any actual connection with these books, and no copyright infringement is intended.

    It’s been pointed out to me that negative critiques of historically ludicrous “Regency” ball programs, however justified, are not actually helpful for people who are not dance scholars and whose audience is not interested in serious study of historical dance, but who would like to do a decent job programming such a ball, or at least avoid making obvious idiots of themselves by calling seventeenth-century dances at a Regency- or Jane Austen-themed event.

    That’s a reasonable complaint.  It’s always easier to criticize than to be constructive.  And most of Kickery delves too deeply into the details for a modern country dance caller who just wants to do their gig.

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  • July 2013 Gig Calendar

    This is another month that's going to be mostly occupied by fellowship research, but I'll also be spending a week at dance camp and then doing a cluster of workshops and a ball at the end of the month!  I'm barely leaving Connecticut, but I'll be ping-ponging constantly among four different cities.  Here are the details:

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  • They ought to be ashamed of themselves

    A while back, a friend sent me a flyer and the dance program for a “Regency ball” (the organizers’ term, not mine) in their area.  I’m not going to tell you where, or when, or who the caller was, because there are plenty of similar events going on all over (at least) the English-speaking world.  But I am going to tell you one thing:

    This program is utter bullshit.

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  • Dixie Swirl

    The Dixie Swirl is a short tango-ish sequence found in F. Leslie Clendenen's compilation Dance Mad (St. Louis, 1914).  While it is not actually in the tango section and doesn't really have much of a tango feel, the brief description states that it is to be done to tango music.  It is attributed to Mrs. Nantoinette Ohnmeiss, about whom I've not been able to discover any information.

    The sequence appears at first glance to be eight bars, which is really too short to be interesting:

    2b    Gallop four times along line of dance (slide-close x4)
    2b    Two-step (presumably a full turn)
    4b    Swirl (the spin turn described here)
    Repeat from the beginning

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  • New England Regional Fellowship

    Much obliged for the quadrilles, which I am grown to think pretty enough, though of course they are very inferior to the cotillions of my own day.
                — Jane Austen, letter of February 20, 1816, to her niece Fanny

    A formal announcement has at last been made: I will be spending the next year (June 1, 2013-May 31, 2014) as one of the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium research fellows.  I'm very excited and honored to have received a research grant which more typically goes to those with a conventional academic career path.  And I'm thrilled that this will enable me to devote months of intense research time to the complicated topic of cotillions, which I've been looking into off and on over the past year or so.

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  • June 2013 Gig Calendar

    I'm going to spend large parts of June on fellowship-related research work, so my public gig schedule is very light this month.  The schedule as it currently stands now is below.  DJ gigs appear on my schedule somewhat randomly, so check back for those!

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  • May 2013 Gig Calendar

    Along with my usual monthly classes, this month I'll be calling for a Regency-era ball with an American theme and making a trip down south to teach waltz in North Carolina before making my way slowly back up the east coast.  The schedule as it stands now is below.  As usual, I add DJ gigs to my schedule somewhat randomly, so check back to see when those appear.

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Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

Email Susan

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