I was expecting to spend July quietly at home, but it looks like I'll be making a quick DJing-and-research trip to Boston before returning home to prepare for my trip to Scotland in August!
Author: Susan de Guardiola
-
Revisiting La Russe
Twelve years ago, I wrote a brief post explaining how to dance “La Russe”, a redowa/mazurka variation I found, like so many others, in M. B. Gilbert’s Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) and [George] Washington Lopp’s La Danse (Paris, 1903). I remain confident in my reconstruction, but in the intervening years I’ve discovered the official music for it, which clarifies that it was intended as an independent dance rather than merely a variation, and a bit of background. So it’s time to revisit La Russe!
First, I’d suggest going back and reading my original post on La Russe, since I am not going to go back through the details of how to perform it.
The choreographer of La Russe remains unknown, but apparently that was intentional: La Russe was created and promoted by the American Society of Professors of Dancing, which had a policy of not crediting the choreographer(s) for the dances they published as their own. La Russe was established among them by early 1882, as their proceedings record that at their thirty-eight meeting, on April 2, 1882, they voted to publish original music for the dance by George W. Allen and noted that the step would be practiced at their next meeting.
(more…) -
June 2024 Gig Calendar
Summer is a-coming in, and it's likely to be hot. I want to spend my time in nice, cool libraries doing research instead of hot, sweaty dance spaces with no air conditioning! I'll be DJ'ing in the Boston area early this month and spending at least five days reading in various libraries. And doing yardwork. Lots and lots of yardwork. Sigh. Stay cool!
-
May 2024 Gig Calendar
I'm going to start off May with a long trip to England to teach and call at a folk festival and then do some research in London, where the British Library is finally semi-functional again after last autumn's cyberattack. I have a lengthy "shopping list" of sources to look at and a list of museum exhibitions to visit while they are paging them!
After that, and April's travel insanity, I'm going to spend the rest of the month at home recovering and hopefully catching up on processing and cataloguing my research photos all the way back to February…
-
April 2024 Gig Calendar
April is going to be fun! I'll be heading to Chicago to run dance workshops and a ball for a Regency-themed LARP and an evening of 18th and 19th century French dance, to Massachusetts for the New England Folk Festival (NEFFA), and then down to Staten Island (NYC) for an 1824 Lafayette Ball. I don't put library days on my schedule, but I'll have time this month at both the New York Public Library and the Newberry. In between I'll try to keep catching up on cataloguing material from previous library trips!
-
March 2024 Gig Calendar
March is…Massachusetts month! Two trips to Boston (well, Cambridge and Concord) for DJing, researching, and teaching a weekend of waltz and more, plus an online lecture for a Lowell group. Woo hoo!
-
Leap Year figure, Washington, D. C., 1892
Not having any more convenient descriptions of cotillion (dance party game) figures with leap year themes in books of such figures, I have to take them where I find them — in this case, in a description of a society leap year ball attended by no fewer than seven foreign ministers of different nations held in Washington, D. C., on March 24, 1892. The ball was described briefly in The New York Times on March 25, 1892. The majority of the short article is taken up by lengthy lists of all the important people who organized and attended the event, but in between, there is a description of a cotillion figure. Interestingly, it was led by two couples simultaneously, from “opposite ends of the hall”.
Dancing was general until 9:30 o’clock, when the cotillion began, led from opposite ends of the hall by Miss Richardson with Mr. William Slack and Miss Stout with Mr. Clifford Richardson. In the selection of the favors the greatest ingenuity had been exercised, and the laughter-provoking devices were highly satisfactory.
Perhaps, sensible of the number of people attending, they were actually running two cotillions in parallel?
-
“The Leap Year Ball”: a poem, 1896
Before getting back to detailed newspaper descriptions of leap year balls, here’s a less detailed but still useful description of one in the form of a very mediocre poem. It was published on page three of the Oakdale Leader, in Oakdale, California, on Friday, February 14th, 1896.
The leap year elements mentioned specifically in the poem are:
- the ladies “managing” things and taking the author into the ballroom
- the “beaux” sitting in a row waiting for partners and the ladies rushing to find one, making sure no one was left out
- Fannie and Julia as some sort of ball organizers or floor managers, wearing badges and making sure things went smoothly
- a lady acting as treasurer and, by implication, asking the author to dance
I admit to cynically feeling that the ladies being concerned that none of the “gints” were slighted was showing more care for their feelings than many gentlemen showed for those of ladies when in conventional roles — the ladies were perhaps deliberately setting an example for the gentlemen of how they wished to be treated.
-
February 2024 Gig Calendar
The end of winter is in (distant) sight. and I am slowly ramping up travel again as we hopefully pass out of peak-respiratory-illness season. But I still expect to spend most of February quietly at home muttering over translations from several languages.
-
Four Tiny Polka Redowa Variations
Believe it or not, even I get a little bit tired of going through the seemingly endless list of insignificant couple dance variations published in M. B. Gilbert’s Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) and reprinted in French in G. W. Lopp’s La Danse (Paris, 1903). Studying all of them is important for my overall project of analyzing late nineteenth century American couple dance variations, but a lot of them are just trivial as individual dances, though still useful as data points and material for improvisation.
As with my trio of tiny galop variations a few years ago, here are four dances that fall in the mazurka/redowa classification that just don’t have enough to them to warrant individual posts.
(more…)
