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

November 24, 2025

La Marjolaine

La Marjolaine, The New Society Dance, was published by the White-Smith Music Publishing Co. in 1888. The music was “arranged from an Italian theme” by Pierre Duvernet with an accompanying “combination of figures” (so generic they don’t really qualify as a dance) by E. W, Masters. The title page of the sheet music may be seen below; click to enlarge.

The figures are a very simple eight-bar sequence: a typical late nineteenth century variant of the “heel and toe” polka combined with the four-slide galop. Although the dance is clearly a two-step, complete with music in 6/8, that term is never used in the instructions – an interesting hint that the two-step was not yet well-known as a term in 1888 as it would become in the 1890s.
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November 3, 2025

November 2025 Gig Calendar

One ball down, one to go! The big event this month is my annual trip to Gettysburg for Remembrance Day Weekend, this year with only one ball. I’ll also squeeze in a quick trip to Boston and a three-week series of disco line dance classes before retreating home to more-or-less hibernate for a couple of weeks and work on writing and blog restoration before things pick up again in the first half of December.

A full list of events further into the future may be found on my overall gig calendar.
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September 15, 2025

Not just “Harvest Home”

Long, long, ago I published a reconstruction of the mid-19th century American contra (country) dance published as “Harvest Home” in some of Elias Howe’s dance compilations. I have nothing new to add to that reconstruction, but as I’ve collated more and more contra dances of that era, I’ve found the same figures under a couple of other names in other source, including one predating Howe’s publication of it, with a suggestive pattern of differences.
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August 5, 2024

Highland Mazourka

Let’s get the important part out of the way first:

The Highland Mazourka is not a mazurka.

It is, however, a delightful example of the nineteenth-century tendency to transpose dances from one time signature to another. In this case, typical polka mazurka sequences have been transposed from 3/4 time to 4/4 time with a bit of extra hopping added to fill out the music, which should be of the Scottish strathspey style. The polka mazurka itself consisted partly of polka (2/4) steps transposed to 3/4 time. Confused by all these shifting time signatures? Fear not; all will be made clear below!

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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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February 29, 2024

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?

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February 18, 2024

“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.

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January 29, 2024

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.
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November 6, 2023

Early Foxtrot: The Zig-Zag
I don’t usually write about foxtrot in November, but I don’t usually teach foxtrot in Ukraine in the middle of a war, either, and last month, the dancers of Kyiv’s Vintage Dance Community wanted something for foxtrot that I hadn’t previously described here on Kickery. Here is the description for their future reference and that of others interested in the variations for the foxtrot of the 1910s.

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At least two versions of a zig-zag sequence appeared in short booklets published in 1914 and 1915:
- The Zig-Zag Step and “Trot”: Joan Sawyer’s How to Dance the Fox Trot (Columbia Graphaphone Company, New York,1914)
- The Zig-Zag Run: Description of Modern Dances as Standardized by the New York Society Teachers of Dancing and approved by the Congress of Dancing Societies of America at meeting held December 27th, 1914, in New York City, N. Y. (American National Association Masters of Dancing, Pittsburgh, 1915)
Sawyer characterized the figure as a “hard one” but also “loads of fun”. Her description:
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October 5, 2023

No “Secesh”, 1862

On January 25, 1862, a dramatic little story appeared in a column in The Philadelphia Inquirer, “The New York Letter”, which covered news from New York City. The United States was eight months into the Civil War against the Confederacy (formally, the Confederate States of America, or C. S. A.), and New Yorkers were on the alert for Confederate spies, or “Secesh” (secessionists). So it was quite alarming for a gentleman to notice, in a paint shop,

several suspicious looking bundles, boxes, etc., marked “C. S. A. Sutler’s Department,” “C. S. A. Medical Department,” etc.

He reported the items to the police, and detectives were duly assigned to watch the shop, where, on the evening of January 23rd (going by the date of the column), they noticed someone leaving the premises,

enwrapped in a long cloak and scarf, carrying the suspicious bundles under his arm

Suspicious indeed! The detectives followed him to a house, which he and dozens of other cloaked men entered. Was it a secret meeting of spies? Smugglers? Terrorists? Police surrounded the house, but after sending one policeman inside to reconnoiter, they abruptly retired from the scene.

Why did they leave? And what does this have to do with dance, anyway?

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