Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian
I’m staying warm this winter with lots of travel and dance, including our first Connecticut Regency tea dance and DJ gigs in three cities! I’m still adding gigs, but here’s the February schedule so far:
Edited to add: note that my February 10th & 12th Regency events in Connecticut have been moved to February 17th & 26th, respectively, due to the enormous snowstorm of February 8-9th.
The two-step of the 1890s and early 1900s was so simple to dance, and so aggressively condemned by many dancing masters, that it’s actually fairly unusual to find a good description of it in a dance manual, though minor variations and sequences of dubious originality and debatable utility abound. English dancing master Edward Scott, in How to dance and guide to the ball-room (London, c1902), provides a rare overview of the basic dance as performed in Edwardian England.
Steps and timing
Scott specifies that the music for the two-step should be in 6/8, and explains that it is “practically our old friend the galop performed with figures, in regulated sequences, and to a different rhythm,” though Americans, he claims, apply the name two-step to “any dance founded on the chassé movement, or that in which one foot appears to be chasing the other.”
Happy new year! I'm back on the road again in New York, Connecticut, and Boston this month after my holiday break:
There are many, many sets of early nineteenth-century quadrilles, most of which are simply new music for the First Set or include only minor variations on the standard figures. While I don’t normally publish reconstructions of the figures for random sets of quadrille music, this set is of particular interest because a high-quality recording of it is available on The Regency Ballroom CD by Spare Parts.
The music is from the first series of T. Simonet’s Fashionable Parisian Quadrilles, Performed by the Bands of Messrs. Michau, Musard and Collinet, with their appropriate Figures as danced at Almack’s, the Argyll Rooms and at the Bath & Cheltenham Assemblies. The manual is undated, but in February, 1823, the fashionable magazine La Belle Assemblée reported the publication of “Nos. 42 and 43” of the series, commenting positively:
This is really an elegant little work both in its contents and its typography. We recognize many of the quadrilles as being great favorites in the French metropolis, and the whole of them are composed in a very characteristic and original style.
The Pasadena, a would-be replacement for the two-step, appears in the 1900 reprint of New York dancing master Allen Dodworth’s 1885 tome, Dancing and its relations to education and social life, but can be dated back to at least 1898. It appears to have been created as a dancing school dance, as Dodworth’s nephew, T. George Dodworth, discussed in his introduction to the new edition of his uncle’s manual:
In order to bring the work up to date, I have been requested
to write an introduction which will include a list of dances that have come into fashion since my uncle’s book was originally published.
As a matter of fact, however, society dances have decreased, rather than increased, during this interval. When this work first appeared most of the round dances described in its pages were fashionable. But Dame Fashion is fickle, and, owing to some unaccountable change in taste, we now have only the Two Step, the Waltz, occasionally a Saratoga Lancers, and the Cotillion. In the dancing-schools the old dances are still taught, but with numerous new combinations, which are composed to improve the pupil and keep alive the interest. From these combinations we have the Tuxedo Lancers, the Amsterdam, Gavotte der Kaiserin, Minuet de la Cour (for four persons), and the Pasedena.
October is when life gets crazy again, with a weekend in New York City, several days in Boston, the tenth Regency Assembly mid-month, and heading off to beautiful Санкт-Петербург at the end!
I’m on the road through early September, and then after a little flurry of gigs in the middle of the month, spending a couple of quiet weeks catching up after five weeks of near-constant travel. Here are the gigs open to the public:
It’s not unusual for new sources to turn up that make me go back and reconsider a reconstruction. It’s a little irritating for it to happen less than a month after I finally get around to publishing one here on Kickery, and doubly irritating for it to be not a new source but old sources I simply hadn’t looked at recently. Fortunately, this is less a change in my reconstruction than further background and options.
In reconstructing the fourth figure of the Mid-Lothians, an early 1820s quadrille, I wrote in my reconstruction notes that “I’ve never found any description of what step sequence to use for this figure,” referring to the grand chain. Actually, I had come across such, many years ago, and they had simply slipped my mind. But I was looking through quadrille sources for a different project and found them again, so here is a little more information about performance options for the grand chain.
June and July are my relatively quiet months this year, at least for public events, though I'm still adding things to my calender. Here's the current status, with more TBA:
Fascination is another of the myriad minor waltz variations given by dancing master M. B. Gilbert, in his Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890), who includes the dance “by permission of D. B. Brenneke”, presumably the creator. It is essentially a longer and slightly more complex elaboration on the Gavotte Glide.
Gilbert’s description reads:
First Part:–Slide left foot to side (2d), 1, 2; draw right to left, placing weight on right, 3; one measure. Repeat one measure. Slide left to side, 1, 2; draw right to left and slide left to side (chassé), & 3; one measures. Draw right to left and slide left to side, & 1, 3; draw right to left, placing weight on right. 3; one measure.
Second Part:–Waltz four measures. Recommence at first part.
Counterpart for lady.
The dancers are in standard waltz position, the gentleman facing the wall. The lady dances the same moves on opposite feet.
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Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian
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