Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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Author: Susan de Guardiola

  • Eight Easy Setting Sequences for Regency-Era French Quadrilles

    I rarely have the opportunity to teach a wide range of Regency-era setting sequences, but there are dozens of them extant and suitable for use in French quadrilles such as the first set.  Using variant setting sequences when setting to one’s partner is one of three ways to jazz up the oft-danced first set (the other two being using more exotic sequences for the other figures and changing the figures themselves) as well as in other French quadrilles for the setting part of the omnipresent “Balancez et un tour de mains” (set and turn your partners) figure.

    The following selection of eight four-bar setting sequences is drawn from two sources in particular: the Scottish manuscript Contre Danses à Paris 1818 and the useful Elements of the Art of Dancing by Alexander Strathy (Edinburgh, 1822).  Curiously, the best sources for quadrille steps other than the actual French manuals come from Scotland — the Auld Alliance revived in dance!

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  • Holly Berry

    • Era: late 1850s onward

    “Mrs. Henderson has introduced this dance in compliance with the request of pupils and friends, who were at a loss for a cheerful country dance in which all might join without previous instruction in the fashionable dances.”

    Holly Berry is a short set dance apparently composed by London dance teacher Mrs. Nicholas Henderson in the 1850s.  Its first known appearance is in the second edition of her Etiquette for Dancing, published in the 1850s.  The dance was also included in Elias Howe’s American dancing master and ball-room prompter, published in Boston in 1862, which appears on the Library of Congress website here.  Howe’s manual, unusually, includes a specific credit to Mrs. Henderson.

    The dance is reminiscent of the galopade country dances of the 1830s and was perhaps seen as too old-fashioned in style by the mid-19th century.  It does not appear to have been commonly reprinted and probably was not wildly popular.  But it makes an interesting change of pace in a Victorian or American Civil War-era reenactment ballroom.  (Edited 10/17/25 to add: Despite its inclusion in Howe’s book, I’ve no real evidence of it being danced in America and would not include it at a specifically American-themed ball.)

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  • Wrestling with Belle Brandon

    (Note: since this post was written, I’ve expanded my research on this figure and written a follow-up post, Revisiting Chassé Out, which discusses further sources and slightly alters my conclusion about the performance of the chassé out figure.)

    Recently my English friend and fellow dance teacher/reconstructor Colin Hume asked on the English Country Dance mailing list for help on some American dances he plans to teach later this month at a festival.  He posted his notes (the final version is now up here) and asked for advice, since he’s not a specialist on historical American dance.  I do a lot with quadrilles (French, American, English, Spanish, etc.) so I pounced on the challenge of the 1858 set he proposed to use, the Belle Brandon Set.  This five-figure quadrille is drawn from Howe’s Ball-Room Handbook (Boston, 1858) by Massachusetts dancing master and music publisher Elias Howe.

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  • Society of Dance History Scholars Conference, Saratoga Springs, NY (June 12-15, 2008)

    I will be attending the annual conference of the Society of Dance History Scholars this weekend up in Saratoga Springs, New York.  I am not presenting at the conference, but I hope to meet other scholars with an interest in social dance history and reconstruction and possibly involve myself in some of the working groups that match my interests (Reconstruction, Early Dance, and Popular/Social/Vernacular Dance).

    This will be my first SDHS conference, and I don’t expect to know too many people there.  I’d be very happy to meet anyone who reads this blog or hear from anyone I already know that you’re attending.

  • A Waltz Quadrille (1893)

    By the end of the 19th century, quite a number of quadrilles were being published that didn’t follow the earlier form of having multiple separate figures.  Although this dance does have two distinct dance parts, the original instructions (which may be seen here) are clear that they should be treated as one long figure:

    Play an ordinary waltz and do not stop between the numbers.

    The source of the dance is The Prompter’s Handbook by J.A. French, published in Boston in 1893.  I haven’t looked for any other sources for this particular set of figures – it’s a trivial little quadrille which I reconstructed in order to have a late-evening set dance that was easy and provided an excuse for plenty of waltzing.

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  • Another Note on the Early Foxtrot

    While searching through a periodicals index I came across an interesting little article that neatly summarizes my previous three foxtrot posts.  “How to Dance the Fox Trot” was published in the Los Angeles Times on October 18, 1914.  It commends the dance as

    the most simple of all the new dances.  If you were discouraged when you tackled the tango or maxixe, here is a dance that every one can dance and enjoy with practically no mental exertion.

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  • Regency & Renaissance Dance Workshops, NYC (June 1, 2008)

    I will be teaching two dance workshops for The Elegant Arts Society in New York City this Sunday, June 1st.  Logistical details are here.

    The first (1:00-3:45pm) will focus on the dances of the Regency era (1810-1820), including steps and figures for country dances and the Royal Scotch and Caledonian Quadrilles, plus the Regency-era waltz.  The Royal Scotch Quadrilles feature the "star" figure described in an earlier article here.

    The second class (4:00-6:00pm) will focus on the lively, stamping, Spanish-influenced canario, using the canario section of Caroso’s 1581 dance Cesia Orsina as an example of joint and solo variations and improvisation.

  • The Mistletoe Hesitation

    The Mistletoe Hesitation is a lovely little sixteen-bar hesitation waltz sequence originally published in F. Leslie Clendenen’s Dance Mad, or the dances of the day (St. Louis, 1914), a collection of dances and dance moves borrowed liberally from other dance teachers and manuals.  The Mistletoe is attributed to M.W. Cain and is one of the earliest uses I have found of a twinkle step.

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  • Fancy Little Foxtrot

    This is a nifty little move from the short Bassett/Elliott film, “The Much Talked About ‘Fox Trot’ ” (dated 1916) and is unlike anything else I’ve ever seen in a 1910s foxtrot: it actually has a hop.  A hop in the foxtrot!  That should startle anyone watching you.  The sequence isn’t terribly difficult and should be accessible once a dancer is past the complete-novice stage.

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  • Quick-Quick-Slow: The Two-Step Infiltrates the Foxtrot

    In my previous foxtrot post I covered the basic walking and trotting patterns of the early foxtrot of the 1910s.  These patterns are characterized by alternating series of slow (S) or quick (Q) steps, simple traveling interspersed with occasional sideways glides or half-turns, and consistently starting on the same foot (gentleman’s left, lady’s right).  This simple foxtrot was complicated almost immediately by variations of rhythm, most notably the “quick-quick-slow” (QQS, or “one-and-two (pause)”) rhythm of the 19th-century two-step and polka.  This post will discuss some of the variations introduced in the pre-1920 foxtrot as described by dancing masters Maurice Mouvet (1915) and Charles Coll (1919) and demonstrated by Clay Bassett and Catherine Elliott on film (1916).

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Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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