Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

Welcome to the original-format Capering & Kickery blog! Due to the Typepad shutdown in September and the resultant move to WordPress, the entire post archive is not yet available, as each post must be individually edited (formatting, images, music, videos, links, etc.) and indexed before it is restored. Please check back regularly over the next few months to see the progress in rejuvenating the blog!

Note: in the restored posts below, most of the internal links (to other Kickery posts) will remain down until the linked post is also restored. If you have a request to prioritize a particular post or set of posts, please contact me at the email above!

Post Archive

October 1, 2025

October 2025 Gig Calendar

This was always intended to be an at-home month as I teach my local classes and work on promoting two, count’em, TWO balls which, in a fit of insanity, I scheduled only three weeks apart. Life is now complicated by the ongoing project of restoring my blog on a new platform and developing a website around it. The fact that this post exists is evidence of (slow) progress!

Keep reading for the list of this month’s classes and ball. A full list of events further into the future may be found on my overall gig calendar.
continue reading ->
June 3, 2024

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.
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October 2, 2023

Brain Fever, 1840

Ah, sweet October, which I generally devote to discussion of fancy dress and masquerade balls, weird cotillion figures, and similar frivolity!

I have two words to start off the month in the proper spirit:

headless quadrille

Specifically:

The first couple is Anne Boleyn and Louis XVI. They are facing Lady Jane Grey and Marino Faliero (a 14th century Venetian Doge). Marie Antoinette and Charles I make up the first side couple, facing the Earl of Essex, dancing alone.

In case anyone missed the connection, all of these people were beheaded.

Themed quadrilles from history or literature were very common at fancy dress balls in the nineteenth century, but this really has got to be the Best Theme Ever. I just about died laughing when I realized the joke.

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October 26, 2020

A Louisville Masquerade, 1843

Here’s a lively account of a jolly and slightly drunken masquerade held in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1843. This account has a little of everything: costumes, bad puns, a bit about the dances, and the effects of alcohol on the revelers. It’s too long a report to comment on every bit of it, but the entire thing is transcribed at the bottom of this post.

The report starts out with a lot of philosophy about the joys of masquerades, but the first really useful bit is that as in A Few Friends, the unmasking is done at supper-time, which was probably around midnight:

The unmasking at the supper table is often a great source of laughter and surprise, when it discovers the faces of numerous acquaintances who have been playing off their wit and raillery against each other all the evening, under their various disguises.

All sorts of people attended masquerades, which is part of what made them scandalous. In Kentucky, at least, this mixing was not to be feared, though I suspect the upper classes might have differed on this point:

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October 15, 2020

Professor Webster’s Masquerade Party, 1876

On March 18, 1876, the Morning Herald of Wilmington, Delaware, published a short blurb covering a recent “masquerade party” given by one Professor Webster at the Dancing Academy Hall. Unusually, the newspaper coverage says nothing about the costumes other than that there were enough of them to “have exhausted a first class costumer’s establishment, and have taxed the ingenuity of an artist.” Instead, we get an actual dance program, consisting entirely of quadrilles, Lanciers, and glide waltzes, and accompanied by names which might be masquerade costumes, though I’m not certain of that.

Professor Webster was a long-time Wilmington dancing master – he was still teaching as late as June 4, 1899, when the Sunday Morning Star reported on the closing reception of his current series of dance classes (see about two-thirds of the way down the first column here.)

Here’s the list of dances, in order.

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October 12, 2020

A Fancy Dress Party (from A Few Friends), 1864

A Few Friends, by Korman Lynn, was serialized in nine parts in Godey's Lady's Book during the year 1864. The serial doesn't have a lot of plot; it describes eight evenings of a group of friends gathering together to, for the most part, play parlor games. It's great for anyone who wants to research mid-nineteenth century parlor games, which are described in elaborate detail, but the only section of any real interest to me is the final one, in which the friends gather for a fancy dress party.

To pick up the story at this point, it is only necessary to know that the kind and generous Ben Stykes has been quietly pursuing the lively Mary Gliddon from the beginning of the story, though a certain Mr. Hedges, a young man from Liverpool, is also interested in her.

Even a single part of the story is too long for me to transcribe here, but I'll quote the costume descriptions, some of which are detailed and unusual, and the resolution of the romance.

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June 22, 2020

Early Foxtrot: The Minuet Turn

Keeping with the foxtrot theme, here's one more little sequence for foxtrot or one-step from Edna Stuart Lee's Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916). Despite its overt simplicity, it actually manages to present a minor reconstruction issue! As for the name…well, to be perfectly honest, I see absolutely no connection here to the minuet, any more than I do with Newman's Minuet Tango. There seems to have been some concept of "minuet" in the 1910s which I have completely failed to grasp.

The gentleman's steps are given; the lady dances opposite. The dancers begin in normal ballroom hold, the gentleman facing forward along line of dance and the lady backward.

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June 18, 2020

Early Foxtrot: The Pavlowa Extension

For no reason other than habit, June is always foxtrot month for me, and despite the general shutdown of dance classes, I’m lucky enough to have a convenient partner at hand for experimentation with new variations. So let’s look at yet another of the many step-sequences described in Edna Stuart Lee’s Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916)!

The Pavlowa Extension was, of course, named for the famous ballerina Anna Pavlowa (Pavlova), who toured America in the mid-1910s and dipped into social dance choreography with a music-composition contest resulting in a trio of dances published in The Ladies’ Home Journal in early 1915. She (or her ghostwriter) and (supposedly) members of her troupe also offered opinions and suggestions about dancing the one-step, Boston, and foxtrot. This variation, however, is not among those even indirectly associated with Pavlova. It probably was merely named in her honor, or perhaps was inspired by a characteristic movement in her dancing.

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June 10, 2019

Early Foxtrot: Quick Dips

Ah, June, when one turns one's thoughts (and feet) to…weird little foxtrot variations!

This time around, let's look at a pair of steps, or rather step-sequences, from Edna Stuart Lee's Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916) that both involve quick dips. These are actually ever-so-slightly harder to do than the usually run of walks, trots, glides, and two-steps that make up a great deal of the 1910s foxtrot repertoire. Lee noted that the first of these, The Coney Island Dip, is "very exhilarating and excellent exercise for the lungs."

The gentleman's steps are given; the lady dances opposite.

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October 11, 2018

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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