Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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Author: Susan de Guardiola

  • A Calico Ball, British Columbia, 1885

    As described by Lucie Armstrong in The Ball-Room Guide (London and New York, c1880):

    The Calico Ball is a fancy ball at which the dresses are made of calico.  Sateen, chintz and velveteen are allowable, and any other material which is made of cotton.  The invitation, of course, states the nature of the ball.

    It really seems to have been primarily about the fabric rather than any costume theme, though obviously some costumes will work better when made out of cottons than others.  She goes on to make some suggestions.  For ladies: a dairymaid, a charity girl from St. Giles’, or a Dresden shepherdess.  For gentlemen: a Maltese peasant, Albanian costume, Saxon dress, or an Italian peasant.

    The anonymous author of Masquerades, tableaux and drills (New York, 1906) added more details:

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  • Aladdin Quadrille

    Like the New Scotia Quadrille, the Aladdin Quadrille is one of several single-figure quadrilles found in the “New, Enlarged, & Complete Edition” of D. (David) Anderson’s Ball-Room Guide (Dundee, this edition undated but probably c1886).  This is a simple, fun figure that would fit easily into a Scottish-themed ball.

    Despite there being various quadrille sets called the Aladdin Quadrilles, Anderson doesn’t seem to have had any specific music in mind.  He notes only that it can be danced in 2/4 or 6/8.

    Aladdin Quadrille (8 bars introduction + 64 bars x4)
    8b   Introduction/honors (not repeated)
    8b   All promenade round
    4b   Ladies advance to the center and retire
    4b   Gentlemen advance to the center and retire
    8b   All set to partners and turn by the right hand
    8b   Head couples advance and retire, then half right and left
    8b   Side couples advance and retire, then half right and left
    8b   Grand chain half round to places
    16b All waltz (in duple time) around (see performance notes below)

    The figure is danced four times, with the head couples leading on the first and third iterations and the side couples leading on the second and fourth.

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  • Early Foxtrot: Catch Steps

    I spent a lot of time teaching foxtrot this spring, and after going through my usual repertoire of easy foxtrot variations with several different groups, I feel I need to add a few new steps.  Nothing complicated, just something to spice up my standard set.  Both of these steps are taken from Edna Stuart Lee's Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916).

    The basic catch step is just a simple way to change the lead foot, either because it's needed for a variation or just for fun.  It's so easy I can explain it without a little numbered chart: 

    Gentleman starts left forward.  Walk for awhile.  When you want to change lead foot, make a single two-step.  Keep walking with the lead (odd count; the strong beat of the music) on the other foot.  The lady does the same thing, but backward and starting on the right foot.

    More formally:

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  • The Western Normal Newport

    The Western Normal Newport was named after the Western Association Normal School Masters of Dancing, a professional organization for dancing masters in western North America.  “Normal school” sounds odd to modern ears, but historically, it didn’t mean what we’d imagine today.  A normal school was a teacher-training school, where the “norms” of teaching and subject material were taught; more information on normal schools in general may be found here.  The Western Association Normal School was founded in 1894 under Canadian dancing master John Freeman Davis, its first president.

    My only source for the Western Normal Newport is George Washington Lopp’s La Danse (Paris, 1903).  Lopp was from the northwestern USA and may have been a member of the Normal School or at least aware of it.  The variation’s name, as given in French by Lopp, was Le Western Normal Newport, attributed to l’Association de l’École normale des Maîtres de danse de l’Ouest.

    Given that the school was founded in 1894, the Western Normal Newport was obviously created too late to appear in M. B. Gilbert’s Round Dancing, published in Portland, Maine, in 1890, from which Lopp cribbed so much of his own book.

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  • Prince Leopold’s Birthday Ball, 1859

    One of the most charming descriptions of a fancy dress ball in my collection is that of the event held at Buckingham Palace in honor of the sixth birthday of Queen Victoria's youngest son, Prince Leopold, on April 7, 1859.  This was a juvenile, or children's, ball, but, as we know from descriptions of the dancing lessons given to Victoria's children, the level of dancing skill even at young ages was considerably higher than one would expect from children today.  That said, it's not clear to me whether the youngest children really danced all the dances or whether that was left to the older ones, or perhaps the parents.

    The description I have was printed in The Albion, A Journal of News, Politics and Literature, on April 30, 1859.  The Albion was a weekly New York newspaper that covered British matters extensively and was read by expatriates.  The description was probably copied directly from a London newspaper.

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  • A Masked Ball in Heidelberg, 1840s

    A lengthy, lively description of a masquerade in Heidelberg may be found in Meister Karl’s Sketch-book, by the American humorist, journalist, and folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland, who described the book in his Memoirs as

    …an odd mélange, which had appeared in chapters in the Knickerbocker Magazine.  It was titled Meister Karl’s Sketch-Book.  It had no great success beyond attaining to a second edition long after; yet Washington Irving praised it to everybody, and wrote to me that he liked it so much that he kept it by him to nibble ever and anon, like a Stilton cheese or a paté de foie gras; and here and there I have known men, like the late Nicolas Trübner or E. L. Bulwer, who found a strange attraction in it, but it was emphatically caviare to the general reader.  It had at least a style of its own, which found a few imitators.  It ranks, I think, about pari passu with Coryatt’s “Crudities,” or lower.  (p. 206)

    The Sketch-Book (1855) was a fictionalized travel journal based on Leland’s experiences studying and traveling in Europe as a young man.  In the preface, he explained that it had been written primarily between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, which would have been from 1840 to 1849.  Leland spent three years during this period studying in Heidelberg, Munich, and Paris.  He mentioned the various masked balls in Heidelberg in his Memoirs:
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  • Newport Fancy Dress Ball, 1850

    The final fancy dress of the Newport summer season of 1850 occurred on Wednesday, September 4th.  It was covered by The Boston Herald on September 5th (“Grand Fancy Ball at Newport”, p. 4) and more extensively by The New York Herald on September 6th (“The Grand Fancy Dress Ball at Newport”, p. 1).  The bulk of the coverage was devoted to lists of attendees and their costumes, as is typical for fancy dress balls, but there are some other tidbits of useful information as well.  The New York Herald article is extremely lengthy, so I have not transcribed all of it.  The article from The Boston Herald is quite short, but not nearly as interesting.

    The ball was held at the rebuilt Ocean House, the original of which had opened in 1844, burned down, and been rebuilt.  This Ocean House was not the same as the modern Ocean House in Newport.  A different hotel by the same name opened in 1868, was demolished in 2005, and then rebuilt again in 2010.

    At the RhodeTour website, Dr. Brian Knoth writes about the first two Ocean Houses, with specific mention of the 1850 Fancy Dress Ball:

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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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  • Fox Trot Hats

    I’ve been looking for something amusing to wind up the centennial year of the foxtrot, and I found it in the November 17, 1914, issue of The Richmond Times-Dispatch: some fashion advice for the foxtrotting ladies in the store advertisement shown at left:

    Fox-Trotting Without a Fox Trot Hat
    is like joy riding on a steam roller.

    How do I follow up a line like that?  I can only suggest reading the rest of the ad (click to enlarge) for more delightfully fulsome language.

    For historical dancers, this is a reminder that during the 1910s, dancing in a hat at an afternoon thé dansant was perfectly proper, though judging by the advertisement, either not everyone agreed or not everyone succeeded in finding a suitable hat:

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  • Basic Foxtrots from Edna Lee

    Earlier this year I talked about nine different variations from the handy little booklet Edna Stuart Lee's Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916) in two mini-series, starting here (three posts) and here (two posts).  My choice of sequences may have given the impression that Lee's collection was mostly odd little variations with (often) even odder names (Chaplin Trot, anyone?)  That's because I was skipping over the simplest sequences given by Lee, since I have encountered them elsewhere and written about them, or similar sequences, in earlier posts. 

    Here, I'm going to give a quick rundown of eight very basic sequences that Lee included among her more unusual and/or unique ones so that it is clear that there was a certain basic repertoire overlapping what is found in many other sources.

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Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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